The Waegwoltic Club in flames as wildfires burn in Halifax on June 1.Supplied
For the second time in six weeks, smoke billowed out of the historic Waegwoltic Club in South End Halifax. The Waeg, a social hub for families to swim, sail and play tennis since 1908, had been torched by vandals earlier in the spring, charring the basement and frying the electrical system.
On the scorching Thursday afternoon on June 1, while wildfires raged across a province that was already a tinderbox, workers hammered to fix the damage in the eaves of the 180-year-old building. One worker switched from a hammer to an electrical grinder, which must have accidentally caused a spark, said the club’s chief executive officer David Greaves in a recent interview.
Not long after, Mr. Greaves saw smoke billowing from a dormer. The second floor, with the club’s administrative offices, was also Mr. Greaves’s home – where he and his wife Kim and their goldendoodle Scout had lived for almost a decade.
Fire trucks screamed to the scene. But no amount of water could snuff out the thick black smoke barrelling into the sky. Mr. Greaves had lived there long enough to know the blueprint of the building, that a newer roof had been built on top of an older one.
He brought firefighters to the second floor, where the walls were cool to the touch. It was then that everyone realized the fire was burning inside its own historic shell.
David Greaves with his dog Scout near the burned-out foundation of the original Waegwoltic Club in Halifax on Aug. 1.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
Flames burst out the picture window of the Greaves’s living room. A chimney crashed through the centre of the building. There was no way back, Mr. Greaves thought, standing on the pool deck watching it all.
Firefighters salvaged what they could: blackened pewter trophies and framed, sepia-toned photographs of Waeg-goers over the century dressed in white Victorian dresses and hats.
Around 1 a.m., Mr. Greaves, with Scout on his heels, went to a hotel. The storied building built and notched with axes from a whole other era was gone.
But the Waeg, Mr. Greaves had already determined, was not.
The next morning, he drove to Value Village. He replaced his dapper pastel ensembles, now burned to ashes, with T-shirts and jeans. He moved temporarily into a camper trailer on the property that had been his makeshift office since the arson in the spring. And then he started digging through the rubble.
Mr. Greaves scavenged a few paint-peeled mouldings and table legs from the original Victorian-era furniture – for future architectural inspiration. A safe with photo albums and records was also recovered.
Around a picnic table, office manager Lisa Baker and recreation manager Katelyn Matheson joined Mr. Greaves to come up with a plan, a recreational triage of sorts, to reopen the Waeg.
Mr. Greaves handed the lifeguards a rake and a shovel. For the next five days, he and the staff survived on takeout pizza as they filled dumpster after dumpster with wet, soot-covered debris. They flushed out the pools and crawled the grass where kids ran barefoot, plucking out sharp pieces of glass. They worked until it was dark.
“If you can push yourself extra hard, there’s not a lot of spare time left to ponder,” Mr. Greaves said.
But now and then it would hit him: The original building built by Alfred Gilpin Jones, a former lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia was once a makeshift hospital during the Halifax Explosion in 1917, host to the Prince of Wales in 1919 and the banquet dinner during the G7 summit in 1995, was now just a crumbled foundation.
The burned-out foundation of the original Waegwoltic Club in Halifax on Aug. 1.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
At the picnic table a few days after, Mr. Greaves crafted a buoyant e-mail to the club’s 6,400 members.
The building, now a fenced-off pile of rubble, did not define the Waeg, he declared. He promised that the club would soon be “more vibrant, relevant and, dare I say, fun.”
Three days after the fire, the upper tennis courts reopened. Two days after that, two pools became swimmable. Watching kids joyfully plunge into them made it all feel little bit easier, said Mr. Greaves.
Inside the recreation centre, Mr. Greaves and his staff hung framed photos and arranged blackened trophies on shelves. They added industrial equipment to the small kitchen, built a canteen and a deck. They set tables with glassware and silverware and tablecloths and purchased new Persian-looking rugs.
Everyone pushed toward normalcy – the slushy machine is churning, there’s a new outdoor pizza press, and the Friday night barbecues are back in full swing.
Mr. Greaves is also back wearing his paisley dress shirts. He’s rented a home nearby. At 66, he was set to retire next year, after decades of running clubs in Ontario and Alberta, but he’s postponed it until a new clubhouse is rebuilt, hopefully by early spring of 2026.
“There are so many different ways this could’ve gone better,” said Mr. Greaves, thinking about the arson that led to the construction that led to the devastating fire.
“It kind of breaks your heart a little bit, but it’s done.”