An excavator from Matheson Construction tears down what was the CN Pensioners Club on King Street in Charlottetown Monday.
One of the last visible signs of the historic presence of the railway on Prince Edward Island was demolished Monday in Charlottetown.
The small rectangular cinderblock building located at 281 King Street known as the CN Pensioners Club was torn down and its remains carted away to a dump.
“How many beers have you had in there,” a bystander asked a photographer taking pictures of the demolition. The man, who did not want to be identified, said he used to spend time in the club over the years, but in the last years of its life business was slow. He said never saw any real problems with the patrons, but it did lose its liquor licence at least twice.
The building was the railway’s signalmen’s shed and it was also used for storage. It was also the subject of a column by Island journalist Alan Holman who described it this way:
“Calling it a building is almost too grand. Shed would be a better word, for that's exactly what it is. The Pen was originally built as a shed where railway tools were kept. Inside and out, The Pen is a pretty basic, low-budget operation. In the main room, behind a counter that serves as the bar, there's a cooler for beer and a shelf for the liquor. On the walls are a number of pictures of trains and train accidents from the glory days of rail.”
The club was also the fictional home Hat MacInnes and his friends in many of Holman’s columns in The Guardian on Saturdays. When the pensioners left the club, Hat and his friends moved to Louie the bootleggers up the street.
The last train rumbled off Prince Edward Island in 1989 and CN turned the building over to its pensioners. It served as their clubhouse and bar until they moved out several years ago.
At one time the club even helped spread the word of God when it played host to the Coffee House, one of the branches of Open Door Ministries, a community based outreach of Sherwood Church of Nazarene. Coffee House members met in the pensioners club until they moved to larger quarters in the Notre Dame Convent in 1997.
The Coffee House met every Friday night in the club “providing opportunities for people to find wholeness and freedom in Jesus Christ, particularly those who have been marginalized by society as a result of such things as addictions, mental illness, incarceration or poverty,” stated a story in The Guardian in 2002.
The land the building was on is owned by the City of Charlottetown that had no use for the former club and could not justify the maintenance costs. For the time being the land will not be developed.
