General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[nms]

Ah okay, that makes more sense. The original building is quite nice indeed. If they can fix that up and restore it to a more original condition, then integrate it into the new train station, I think it would be really nice. I'd welcome preserving the addition too, if they could just fix up the brick and windows on it. While many on this forum think heritage preservation is annoying or even pointless in most cases, I'm a strong defender of it when warranted. I'd rather have a city that has a mixture of old and new, lest the entire place turns into some gentrified globohomo wasteland where everything ends up looking the same.

Edit: Wow that heritage report just reminded me that there was an End of the Roll warehouse where that parking lot is. I completely forgot that existed.

The former Waterloo Legion was a former factory with bricked over windows.  After the Legion moved out, the windows were reinstalled and a tech company moved in.  I could see the Rumpel Felt building being incorporated into Regional office space (perhaps the transportation department), much the same way that Union Station originally had railway offices on the upper floors.

As for repaving the lot, I would not be surprised if the concrete floor was not rated for heavy traffic and/or all weather use.

I wonder how they came up with that haha. In the German language, Huether isn't pronounced anything like "heater"...it's more like...hoo-tear? I guess it was probably just easier to say. I'm fluent in German but the pronunciation of things is still a challenge and I've always referred to it as "Hugh-thur" as well.

Most likely the original spelling is Hüther, which translates to a herder. It's the "y" sound that English doesn't have, as in fünf (five).

I can confirm the "Heater" pronunciation.  Though not a linguist, I do know that there was a significant variation in Germanic dialects prior to German unification in the late 19th century which persisted well into the 20th Century before broadcast radio (and later movies) began to smooth out differences.  Christopher Huether, the original owner, was born in 1831 in Baden (now Baden-Württemberg), Germany, which is tucked in southwest Germany against France to the West, and Switzerland to the south.