2.6°C Light Rain 
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It sat alone on the eastern edge of the city amidst a grove of trees, the site itself a natural meeting place of the townspeople long before they placed a building there.
It sat as a sentinel of justice, holding a commanding view down the long main street, a structure too friendly to be severe yet somehow too stern to take lightly. It was a representative of the government, the house of the law.
Built in 1906, it was the first courthouse in the city, granting Cranbrook status as a centre of provincial government. It was all that the city dreamed of becoming in those early, heady days of gold rushes, railways, and land speculation. It is gone.
It must have heard the criticisms issuing from both within and without, from the judges, the juries, and the court clerks. From the forestry and agricultural offices lodged in the basement next to the janitor’s quarters, from the visitors to the courtroom itself. For twenty years the city council and Chamber of Commerce wished it gone, constantly petitioning the provincial government to replace the “ancient and decrepit structure that has outlived its usefulness.”
It survived half a century. It left in 1956. On one of those lovely July afternoons that are perfect for destruction. There was so little fuss, so little notice, that it seems almost as if it somehow dismantled itself; board by board, nail by nail, ashamed of its own obstruction of progress. All that remained, for a brief few hours, was an old cement vault surrounded by a caragana hedge. Then that too was gone.
As the old building floundered and died, so another arose on its coattails.
February, 1953, brought an announcement of plans for project 141-B: a new Provincial Courthouse. Due to delays in securing land, the actual groundbreaking occurred two years later. The Provincial Government was pleased, City Council was pleased, and the Chamber of Commerce was pleased. Frequent mention was made of the fact that the original courthouse was among the oldest in the province, apparently all the more reason for its obliteration. Premier W.A.C.Bennett, conducting the official opening of the new government building on May 28, 1956, remarked that, “Cranbrook and the Province will have a new building worthy of them.” The statement echoes a certain truth.
The new structure has changed little in fifty years. It is a low-slung, characterless creature, a series of uninspired building blocks featuring faceless walls and rows of identical windows. It is a symbol of an era of architecture defined by large lapses of imagination, by pride measured in provincial dollars saved. If indeed justice is blind then this is the perfect place for her to reside.
The city claimed the land beneath the old building. They purchased the neighbouring provincial public works garage bordering 14th Ave. for the sum of $35,000, used it until 1966, and demolished it to make way for the Cranbrook Mall. The grounds themselves became an oval park, Central Park, with a walkway leading to the cenotaph in the centre, directly upon the site of the former Court House. The park is still there, somewhere under the pavement. If indeed justice is blind then this is the perfect place for her to have a picnic, in a parking lot nestled among the translucent nostalgia on a one-way street named progress.
