…this is the second post with my photos of the demolition of the Vankleek Hill Collegiate Institute (VCI). I posted the first one [here] in a Facebook group I moderate, and one of the responses was from someone who posted two videos of the demolition taken from The Review’s [here] YouTube page [here]… which, apparently, still exists. In the first video former principal, Jeff Campbell, takes Louise Sproule, who was the Publisher of The Review at the time, and freelance videographer, Todd Gilbert (both Louise and Todd were former VCI students), on a last tour of the high school before it was demolished.
The second video is former VCI student, Blake MacDonald, talking about his emotions regarding the demolition of the high school he attended for four years. The clips in the video were taken between April & May of 2011, which was the same time I was photographing workers tearing the old school down — this was the second VCI to be torn down, by the way. The original VCI was on, I think, Bond Street, where the curling club is now situated (I’ll figure that out and edit this post eventually). The original VCI was built in 1890… there are no videos of its demolition.
Yeah, so, my own personal experience with high school was, I’m sure, mostly like yours — it was pretty good at the start… then not so great, then I quit for mental health reasons, then came back the next year, quit again, then, at 18-years of age, moved 2,000kms / 22-hours away from Vankleek Hill to Northwestern Ontario [here] for five months to help American tourists fulfill their lifelong fantasy of spending $3,000 for a week of killing a few fish in the middle of nowhere. When I got back to VKH, I tried to enroll in VCI again, but was sent to an Adult School, where I lasted about a semester before quitting again. See? We’re all the same.
…anyway, just click on the first photo to get the carousel going — as always, comments are welcome and now they’re absolutely free to make and, if you’re lucky, some AI firm will not only use your comment to train its newest model, but your collection of words could be the ones that finally put AI into God Mode.
