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T H U R S D A Y
March 6, 2014
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Another church in city’s core? Popular coffee shop Decades evicted to make room for church youth shelter BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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Old School The new CSS may be beautiful and it may be state-of-the-art but it would never have felt like home for retiring English teacher Muriel Morris
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ast summer, when workers began demolishing the old 1950 Chilliwack secondary school (CSS), Muriel Morris happened to be on her way to the new school next door to set up a few things in her new classroom. She stopped by the construction fence a while to watch as an excavator clawed down the old
walls and tore through familiar classrooms. When it got to room 205, she had to walk away. A few doors down would be 210—her room for the last 40 years. Morris will retire this year after spending all but one of her 42 years of teaching in that old CSS building. Her new home, for her final year, has been the school’s new, bright and breezy $56-million campus, which officially opened amidst
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BY CORNELIA NAYLOR cnaylor@chilliwacktimes.com
Cornelia Naylor/TIMES
Muriel Morris (above) sits in the library of the new CSS. CSS (inset) as it looked in 1961. much hoopla last Friday. The merits of the new state-of-the-art building—with its teaching kitchens and robotics labs, with its wide-open spaces and expanses of glass—were the subject of much speechifying by politicians and school officials last week. But the place will never quite sit right with Morris.
SHOP OUR ENTIRE PREOWNED INVENTORY NOW WITH
See OLD SCHOOL Page 27
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ust when some thought there were more than enough churches taking up commercial storefronts in downtown Chilliwack, the popular Decades Coffee Shop on Wellington Avenue has been evicted to make way for yet another. “I am not leaving of my own free will,” Decades owner Ron Laser told the Times Tuesday of the eviction notice he received Feb. 15. “In my personal opinion it’s a huge loss for the community and downtown. Downtown constantly works hard to attract and keep business there, and then for this to happen just seems wrong.” Laser, who own’s the popular coffee, lunch and meeting spot, said he was set to sign a new lease with his landlords, Natalie and Neal Te Brinke, when they told him he had to get out by June 3. The plan is for City Life Church (formerly Glad Tidings) to open a Chilliwack version of Abbotsford’s Cyrus Centre, a church-based youth shelter. The Times has been told the Te Brinkes are connected with Promontory Ministries and Main Street Church, See DECADES, Page 4
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