Aug. 17, 2025
Century Manor’s lead paint is peeling. Graffiti marks its flaking plaster walls. Debris is strewn on its terrazzo floors.
But Graham Cubitt, wearing a respirator mask and illuminating the dark hallways of the long-closed psychiatric hospital building with a portable light, can see past the decay.
“It’s going to be amazing,” predicts Cubitt, director of projects and development with Indwell during a recent tour. “Come back in a year-and-a-half and you won’t believe the place.”
Indwell, a local non-profit that builds and operates deeply affordable housing, plans to restore the heritage building on the former Mountain brow hospital grounds and turn it into 40 supportive apartments.
The Century Manor project is part of a sweeping redevelopment of land off Fennell Avenue West next to St. Joseph’s Hamilton Healthcare’s West Fifth campus.
The transformation, fast-tracked by a provincial minister’s zoning order, includes Schlegel Villages’ plan for two nursing homes with 512 beds on the sprawling site.
The multi-partner initiative also envisions seniors’ housing, a Mohawk College expansion and market-rate rentals with zoning allowing up to 18 storeys.
Century Manor is a 141-year-old High Victorian brick building with two-storey brick wings and a three-storey centre block that has captured the public’s imagination — and heritage advocates’ frustration.
Since its closure in 1995, the vestige of the former Hamilton Asylum for the Insane, has been left to languish and served as a magnet for trespassers.
There’s no other building like it in Hamilton, says local heritage advocate Diane Dent, pointing to its projecting front piece, window arches, lintels, gables and rust-coloured brickwork.
“I just love it. Who wouldn’t look at that building and say, ‘Wow, this is amazing’?” said Dent, co-chair of Friends of Century Manor.
Indwell will restore its heritage features, notably its facade, as it knocks down interior walls to expand small patient rooms into full-sized apartments.
An elevator is to be added to the back, and the rear will have a new functional entrance because the heritage-protected front can’t be altered to make it accessible, Cubitt explained.
The revamped Century Manor will be similar in operations to CityHousing’s 24-unit building downtown on King William Street, where Indwell provides nursing, addiction, psychosocial and food services for residents.
Supportive housing, which comes in various forms, is seen as crucial to help interrupt the cycle of chronic homelessness for those with disabilities, health and addiction challenges.
A new report by the United Way Greater Toronto and the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada urges government to take “bold, new and decisively different actions to turn the tide” of Ontario’s affordable housing crisis.
It calls for 93,000 supportive units among 805,000 deeply affordable homes over the next decade.
“Research has shown that every $10 invested in supportive housing results in up to $22 in public sector cost savings,” says Built for Good — Delivering the Housing Ontario Needs.
As it stands, “decades of underinvestment have left many without access to the housing and supports they need to live safely and with dignity,” says the report, which asserts government has leaned too hard on the private market to solve the affordability crunch and advocates a shift to the non-profit and co-operative housing sectors.
The study, which also calls for 145,000 moderately affordable units as well as the purchase, repair and maintenance of 225,000 units to prevent the loss of affordable stock, identifies $62.6 billion in capital and subsidies by 2030 to meet the three targets.
In Hamilton, a 2024 “point-in-time” count of people experiencing homelessness found more than half of 807 survey respondents had problems with mental health (59 per cent) or substance use (50 per cent).
Century Manor’s proximity to St. Joseph’s modern psychiatric hospital, where future residents can access care, offers a unique advantage, Cubitt points out.
“Our highest level of success is when we continue the gains people have made in some sort of treatment program.”
But lining up various government funding envelopes, especially health dollars to operate supportive housing, is “always challenging,” said Cubitt, echoing the sentiment of other non-profit operators.
Roughly $9 million is estimated for the capital work, with cleanup expected to start in the next month or two, he noted. “There’s a few months of work just getting rid of rubble, debris, and all the old lead paint and everything.”
Indwell has taken on such adaptive-reuse projects involving deteriorated heritage gems in the past, including the Harvey Woods Lofts, a former textile mill in Woodstock.
Century Manor will be a big job, but the building, including its stone and brick, is “sturdy,” Cubitt
That’s encouraging, says Dent, who has watched with disappointment as the building was left to deteriorate despite pitches over the years to breathe life back into it.
The Friends of Century Manor are “relieved” the province is working with Indwell, which is a “positive step” toward restoring and adapting the building, she said.
“We need a solution, and I support what Indwell does and has done in their other developments.”
Cubitt expects Indwell to take title of Century Manor from Schlegel Villages by the end of the year.