SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - One of the city's most notable heritage sites, the Wildcat Cafe, will be closed for major renovations next year.

Yellowknife's oldest restaurant won't look like this next summer. Instead the 73-year-old building will be undergoing extensive renovations, rendering it unusable for the season.- NNSL file photo

"It's reached a stage in its history that it either gets rejuvenated or it's going to crumble," said Mayor Gord Van Tighem of the expected $500,000 worth of renovations the cafe will undergo in the spring.

Although each year there have been small projects done on the 73-year-old log cabin, there haven't been any significant improvements in a long time, he said.

Work on Yellowknife's oldest built structure will commence in the spring, with its completion scheduled for the latter part of the fall, rendering the cafe unusable for the summer.

According to an engineering assessment completed in 2008, the foundation of the summer meeting place has been shifting in place for a number of years.

The 2011 draft budget released Monday has $115,000 carried over from last year's budget to repair the cafe's foundation and $385,000 from the 2011 budget to restructure the building.

The original estimate for the repairs made by an engineer in 2008 was $140,000, but the city couldn't move forward with the project in because local contractors were reluctant to carry out the work for fear of damaging the structure.

A northern-based contractor from Fort Smith, who specializes in log construction, has now been secured for the job and the price has increased to repair more of the damage than was originally planned.

Along with the foundation, the building needs to have water damaged logs replaced, its joints re-chinked and its exterior stained.

Van Tighem said if the building doesn't receive repairs, there could be talk of building a replica, much like the one already in Ottawa's Museum of Civilization.

"It's a mirror image (of the original) and it's hard to walk in because the floor is level," said Van Tighem of the replica.

By closing the business for the season, the city will see a decrease in revenue of about $7,000 and a reduction in expenditure of approximately $5,000.

The cafe is owned by the city and leased each summer to a chef.

For the last three years, that chef has been Pierre LePage, the owner of Le Frolic, Chef Pierre's Catering and Rental Service and Le Stock Pot.

The cafe's closure might mean he'll get a summer off for a change, he said.

LePage said although it's a "neat little place where you get to meet a lot of people," last summer was an exceptionally slow season where he mostly served locals and took in about a third of the revenues he had seen in previous years.

The Wildcat Cafe was built by John Mainland "Smokey" Stout and Willy Wylie in 1937 and is one of the earliest permanent buildings in Yellowknife.

After being closed for more than a decade, the Old Stope Association, a non-profit heritage society that no longer exists, renovated and reopened the cafe in 1979.

In 1992, the city designated it a heritage site and assumed ownership of the building.

Van Tighem said the building is the underpinning of the city's heritage preservation.

"A lot of people when they think of Yellowknife, they recognize the Wildcat Cafe."

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