July 28, 2000
VALERIE G. CONNELL
Nunatsiaq News
IQALUIT — The retention of the old, mixed with the new, is the recipe for the former Apex nursing station.
The lease for the old Apex nursing station property is being turned over to Kirt Eegeesiak and Rannva Simonsen, allowing them to renovate the building and turn it into their home.
The couple have faced many roadblocks in the two years since they purchased the lease from the Iqaluit elders society.
"We’re in the final stages of the paperwork," said Simonsen, a professional architect.
"I’m so happy and honoured and humbled to have the opportunity to be given the trust to work with building and I want to do it so bad," she said. "It’s good for the community."
Simonsen said the restoration of old buildings and "putting them into proper shape" while maintaining some of their history is important.
The building itself is "really good," but it needs insulation and new electrical wiring, she said.
"I’ll do a sensitive job," Simonson said. "It will keep the shape it has now and the impression... will be of the era when the first Hudson Bay buildings came to this place. It will be a beautiful building."
When completed, the building will be landscaped, with a bit of cultivation using rocks and flowers from the tundra, Simonsen said.
‘I know it’s possible because we did that this fall," she said.
Simonsen said she hopes the idea of landscaping with rocks and flowers from construction areas before they are destroyed will catch on in an effort to beautify the community.
Simonson, a native of the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, said the strengthening of culture is very important.
Eegeesiak and Simonsen will build a memorial in front of the building for the people who went south with tuberculosis in the 1940s and 1950s and never came back will be built by.
Simonsen said she and Eegeesiak plan to build the memorial with a trail that people can walk on safely and have a place to sit down. The memorial will also be accessible from the road, but will be set back from it.
"It’s very nice landscape there and... we will make a little trail with the natural material such as stone and walk plants," Simonson said. "[The memorial will be] a little place where you can sit down and enjoy the view and kind of remember and meditate on it."
The property was sold for one dollar to the Iqaluit Historical Society in the early 1990s by the Town of Iqaluit, with a provision that it’s use would in some way benefit the community, said Anne Crawford, a resident of Apex.
She said the Historical Society didn’t continue and when disposing of its assets, transferred the property to the Iqaluit Elder’s Society for a dollar.
Neither organization had the money or other resources to do renovations on building.
The elders’ society sold the property to Egesiak and Simonson without the provision on community benefit.