Historic Halifax
 

As requested I have moved this discussion to a proper thread for the general discussion of Historic Halifax. Please keep all discussion around this topic in this thread unless it related directly to another thread (ie asking about the old Roy building in "The Roy Halifax" thread).

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I was at a used bookstore today and saw a copy of Halifax: Warden of the North, in which the following passage appears:

http://i.imgur.com/AGXQrDp.jpg

That's from an edition published in the mid-1960s, which seems to be about the same era from which ILove and Keith's thinking on the subject of urban renewal comes.

It's an interesting passage. I think it is problematic in some ways but doesn't really demonstrate the sort of outlook that people today tend to project onto 1960's-era Halifax.

The big flaw that I see is that there was a sense that the rich and powerful are made of different stuff than the common folk, and that the poor would be better off under strong direction from above. There was too much paternalism and not enough listening or understanding.

Another huge flaw of the paternalistic approach is that the interests of the poor often don't align with those of the rich, and it is easy to pass off self-interested policies as "help" (or "tough love"). We still see this today with rhetoric about wage slaves needing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they'd do so great if only we treated them more harshly, etc. This isn't altruism, it's business owners not wanting to pay wages. Thankfully, NS and Halifax are not as bad in this area as most of North America.

What I tend to see less of in material from the 1960's is the sort of raw Jim Crow Southern-style racism that people think was common in NS back then. It may have been common in some circles but it really doesn't come through in the laws of the time, news coverage, or passages like these. 60's KKK groups or whatever were not advocating for the government to build nicer housing for black people. The focus on racism is unfortunate because it's mostly a distraction from the primary economic problems. Self-flagellation over perceived racism 50 years ago isn't going to help anybody, and you can't even understand what happened back then without a much more nuanced perspective.

Two things in particular that throw people off are the living standards and the language of the time. "Negro" did not have the connotations it does today. Similarly, Africville's living standards were not that different from poor parts of rural NS inhabited by white people. There was a level of poverty back then that people have trouble identifying with today. It had mostly disappeared by the 1980's, largely because of major modernization projects like public housing construction, new power plants, modern ports and highways, etc. Today I think a lot of people take this infrastructure for granted.

Nice unprompted slam from left field. Was that your picture I saw on the cover of The Idiot Book today? :P

I suppose you can read a book and determine that everything done in urban planning in the 60s was just wrong. I saw all the slums in Halifax in those days including Africville. To me Africville was much worse than rural Nova Scotia. Halifax had a national reputation for very bad slums.
I much prefer the Halifax of today which for all its shortcomings is one of the nicest small cities in North America. Somebody did something right so it wasn't all bad.

Kind of sad, in the sense that "the Beach" sounds like it could have been a really interesting area of the downtown, if it was preserved in some kind of form, whether the structures remained, or at least a general structure or layout of the burrough.

Sort of sounds like The Five Points of New York City:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points,_Manhattan

Here's how Dickens described it:

Keep in mind, those are lines from the mid 1800s not the 1960s. Doh.

What's the idiot book? (But no, I don't think so...)

And to ILove's comment, no, I don't think everything that happened back then was a mistake (though a lot was--certainly the Cogswell interchange was not an improvement on the Victorian blocks that were there, even if those buildings were in need of major renovation.) l just think that "it's old and dirty, better off tearing it down" is an attitude common to that time. ILove's comment about the BMO building on SGR is emblematic of that, as reflected in the passage about replacing the "shabby and decrepit" buildings that became the Historic Properties with something "new and trim."

We agree, anyway, that this is one of the best cities of its size. I wholly endorse that sentiment.

Lol! :haha::haha::haha:

You know they were off a bit when they considered the law courts building 'handsome'.

Bring back the drinking dens! :haha:

Interesting exerpt as I have a later edition where this commentary had been removed. I had never seen this earlier version before now.

The prudish mid-century moralizing of that passage is pretty funny. Sex! Booze! "Shabby and decrepit" buildings! Heavens.

There was no political correctness back then. People described things accurately without worrying that some thin-skinned group might not like the truth about reality.

It wasn't really political incorrectness, just uptight finger-wagging about the disreputable nature of the area. Funny to read from the perspective of today, when we're a bit less ready to clutch at our pearls over the thought of "drinking dens."

Anyway, over in the heritage restoration thread there's a before and after sequence of a block of Toronto's King Street east, pictured in the early 70s vs today. The author of that passages in Warden of the North would probably decree this ready for the wrecking ball.

https://losttoronto2.files.wordpress...002_id0083.jpg


But the after pic really illustrates the folly of knocking things down just because they're shabby looking at a particular point in their history.

https://losttoronto2.files.wordpress...7/p1030119.jpg

That's quite interesting!

PS: I wonder if GMMR was thinking of "Warden of the North" when writing Game of Thrones. :D

You mean GRRM? :)

Nice pics but totally irrelevant as compared to the slums that were dozed in Halifax back in the 50s and 60s. I saw them

That's a pretty general statement, would be cool if you could back it up with pics.

But you probably won't be able to find any, so I will agree that yes, I'm sure there were many buildings that were perhaps non-significant and probably beyond the point of practical repair (especially given the lack of appreciation for our built heritage in those days), but there were many buildings that were lost that could have been brought back and repurposed if somebody had had the foresight to try to save them, rather than raze everything as was the idea of the day. A little 20-20 hindsight to be sure, but the loss is the same. Hopefully we will do better for our future generations.

That said, I realize that we have veered wildly off-topic for this thread, and so I'm not going to comment further on this. Perhaps the discussion could be continued in Old Halifax or some similar thread. (especially if you can provide pics of the old 'slums')

Hardly a valid statement with any merit when you want 90% of the buildings in the city to be dozzed

To be fair to ILove, a lot of the pics of the Halifax slums I've seen look pretty dire. But so did parts of the North End that are still intact and largely restored (especially the area up and down Falkland Street). ILove seems never to have met an old building he's not ready to condemn, so I'm gonna be skeptical about how far gone into ruin a building has to be before he writes it off.

In any case, it wasn't all rotten wooden slums:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8483/8...6b93dc20_o.jpg

Every building in this shot is gone, save for the one at the far left, and every one would have been worthy of preservation. But: DRINKING DENS!

I wasn't going to further derail the SGR thread (maybe we could get part of this moved to a new thread?), but yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of. Don't know what these particular buildings would have looked like by the sixties but we've seen other buildings of similar structure which have been brought back or at least their facades preserved. Wouldn't it be cool if the building front and center had been saved? (especially if it had a ground floor drinking den... lol)

Edit: It occurs to me that this would be a cool name for a new bar... "The Drinking Den" :D

There were houses (slums) all over the city including the north end that have been torn down, so to look at what is left and think that they have all been restored/renovated is a fantasy.
I tend to feel if I would not want to live in these old buildings that neither should anybody else have to. A rat is a rat and nobody should have to cohabitate.
Seems to me as much as I am ready to knock them all down that you are prepared to preserve every old slum, and I fail to understand why you are on a skyscraper forum when you dislike them so.

True story: My sister's condo building in Regina (constructed in 2008) has rats in the basement storage areas because of people leaving edibles down there. A rat is indeed a rat, and it doesn't care at all how old or new a building is.

Wow, if retained, this could have been an iconic Halifax building. Not quite NYC's flat iron, but a similar design concept, obviously. A building designed to connect an important intersection.

What was the purpose of that weird tower on the roof? The building wouldn't have had an elevator, would it?

Probably a hoist way of some sort. Not for people, but most of these buildings had retail on the ground, and the upper floors were warehouse space.

Sounds like someone has been boning up on his architectural history of halifax 101! :D

You can see similar features on some of the surviving buildings in that area. The big upper-floor openings that look like doorways were for lifting up ship cargo with small cranes.

That building is called "The Pentagon Building". Someone123 and I had a discussion about it a while back. I remember it from the very early 1960s.

Possibly one of the unwanted casualties when the surrounding slummy buildings were cleared for Harbour Drive.

Two questions:

(1) Mods, is it possible to move this last part of the discussion to a new thread. I think it is an interesting conversation that I would like to see continue, but it is way off topic relating to 5504 Spring Garden Road.

(2) Does anybody have any pics of the area in its run-down state, just before demolition? I might have a few in my "stash" when I have time to go through it, but most pics I've seen are from earlier times when the buildings were in the prime of their life.

It's interesting to read the different perspectives that largely seem to be related to a particular time in Halifax's history. I have foggy recollections (I was quite young at the time) of the Halifax waterfront being a "working", more industrial place, but a lot of the mass-demolition that was popular at the time came about either before I was born or when I was a toddler.

The Pentagon Building above is, IMHO, a classic case of a building that would have been saved today, but was considered expendable 50 years ago because "progress" was more important at the time. It would be good to continue this thread and I'm interested to see what other buildings that were lost due to "progress" during that whole '50s '60s urban renewal/Harbour Drive wreck-fest.

Thanks! :)

I believe (but don't know for sure) that this are was part of the Slum Clearance from the 1957 report. It was done independently of Harbour Drive/ Scotia Square.
Historic Properties, Morse Teas and what are now part of the Waterside center were outside that clearance area, and hence the fight to save them, when future plans threatened their removal.

Lots has been said about affricville, i wonder what people in the North Clearance area thought?

The Pentagon Building was apparently near what is now the end of Granville Mall:

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...psab9tv7xl.jpg

Here is the location as it looks today. The building on the far left is part of Historic Properties.

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...psxdhs5eum.jpg

So it was taken down to accommodate the Cogswell interchange.

It would be interesting to find a detailed study of the buildings that existed in this area. The "slum" label doesn't do this part of town justice; it was a fine-grained mix of buildings of different levels of quality from different eras. Some of the buildings would have been simple wooden boxes but others would have been worth preserving.

I've read that Prince Edward's townhouse (Prince's Lodge along the Bedford Highway was the country estate) was on the north side of town near the Citadel, but I've never seen paintings or photos and I'm not sure what it looked like or how long it survived.

Another interesting set of buildings were in the Ordnance Yard. Many of these dated back more or less to the original naval dockyard construction in the 1700's. Here's a Notman photo of one of the old stone warehouses from that period. The clock on top is the one that's now on the ugly blue and yellow clock tower down near Nova Scotia Crystal; the mechanism, believe it or not, is from 1772: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtua...ives.asp?ID=13

I think it would be great if some phase of waterfront redevelopment downtown involved faithfully reconstructing some of these old waterfront features that have been lost.

I was reading a report on the Barrington St heritage district (https://www.halifax.ca/heritage-prop...zationPlan.pdf) today and noticed a piece on the Forrester Building, the nondescript yellowish building with Idealbikes:

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img910/818/bvikfL.png
(from google streetview)

I never thought much of this building, but it turns out that it is much older than its late-Victorian neighbours. It was built out of ironstone (the darker slate-like stone) and sandstone in the 1820's. It's one of the oldest commercial buildings on the street. If it were well-restored it would look great.

Very interesting information, I wasn't aware of the significance of that clock.

Reconstructing some of these waterfront features would be amazing. Would be expensive to do properly, which might make it a hard sell, but I'd love to see it.

Just started reading through the "slum study" document:

https://www.halifax.ca/archives/docu...Scotia1957.pdf

Some really interesting info there...

Very interesting. Some of the neighbourhoods looked very run down but the "slum study" showed better redevelopment ideas without the massive Scotia Square super-block.

I was looking through the Nova Scotia Archives and found some images of Argyle Street that I believe is where Scotia Square's Coswell Tower was built. I think the following images are at or near Argyle Street and Jacobs Street (Jacobs Street became an extension of Cogswell Street):

(source: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtua...es.asp?ID=1126) from 1939
http://novascotia.ca/archives/share....%20%20c%202015

(source: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtua...es.asp?ID=1586) from 1941
http://novascotia.ca/archives/share....%20%20c%202015

(source: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtua...es.asp?ID=3051) from 1942
http://novascotia.ca/archives/share....%20%20c%202015

This is an image from 1890 looking north down Argyle Street past Halifax City Hall all the way to the Clayton and Sons factory at Jacobs Street:

(source: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtua...ves.asp?ID=245) from 1890.
http://novascotia.ca/archives/share....%20%20c%202015

I don't know when the Clayton and Sons factory was torn down (I think that is where the Scotia Square Trade Mart now stands) but it still existed in 1935 in this image - http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtua...=479&Nav=false. Here is a postcard of the factory - http://stampauctionnetwork.com/zi/47/224.jpg and a drawing https://oldnorthend.files.wordpress....tory.jpg?w=848 from this website - https://oldnorthend.wordpress.com/category/history/


Wouldn't it be great if Argyle Street still extended down to Jacobs Street (or Cogswell Street) and that instead of the massive Scotia Square being built, smaller, city block sized, 20 - 30 storey tall slender towers were built. Maybe some facades of the more interesting buildings could have been saved with street level retail.

The part of Argyle north of Duke was what Stevenson described as some of the worst slums in the city.

I am interested in the neighbourhood that was torn down to build Scotia Square. One area that I haven't been able to find pictures of is Barrington Street between Duke Street and Jacobs Street (part of which became the extension of Cogswell Street) on the west side, which is the Scotia Square side.

There is this picture from the Nova Scotia Archives which shows that area from a distance in 1960:

(source: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtua...es.asp?ID=1750). The source image allows one to zoom in.
http://novascotia.ca/archives/share....%20%20c%202015

Does anyone know of any pictures of this area prior to Scotia Square being built?

PS: I was able to get this zoomed in screen-shot from the NS Archives picture above: (there appears to be a tavern and "Central"(?) Hotel

https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/83...538/vpAJHT.jpg

Found these in the Stevenson report and at the Archives site:

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...pscjqriulv.jpg

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...psninywgu8.jpg

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...pswlycxgzr.jpg

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...psv0warkdy.jpg

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...psnoj0qoob.jpg


Also found this interesting. The Dockyard, with slummy housing on a narrow Barrington St above, and look at that huge rail ROW. What an opportunity missed:

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...psznik1elm.jpg

I keep looking at those pics and trying to pick out which one I would want to be living in.

Of course I would have probably died along with the hundreds of others in the great Halifax fire of 19??

That rail right of way was a hold over from the north street station. The original deep water piers were located next to the casino. They have been reconstructed but still exist as Jetty nb and nc. That rail extended past the North station and went onto the piers. The piers were transfered in a land swap with the navy in the mid 1960's.

Some interesting images of the area can be found here, although they're fairly grainy.

http://parkscanadahistory.com/series/chs/9/chs9-3a.htm

Thanks, fenwick, Keith and cormiermax for sharing the fascinating pics.

I am afraid I am old enough to have some recollection of the neighbourhoods buried under Scotia Square and I don't think that "slum" is an unfair description.

It is an interesting sociological question why Africville, which was an impoverished, underserviced community but home to a proud African NS population, is so celebrated today, while these largely white working-class streets, also bulldozed by the city in the name of urban renewal, are largely forgotten and unmourned.

It's worth noting that some of the pictures Keith shares date from the 1940s. (The tram car and rails were gone by the summer of 1949.) I don't believe conditions improved over the ensuing 15-20 years. I cannot recall many structures on these blocks that would have been conducive to restoration or repurposing.

The hobby shop whose sign is visible in fenwick's photo at the corner of Barrington Street and Duke, just in front of the NSLP trolleycoach, was a favourite Saturday stop for my dad and me in those pre-Scotia Square days. (It survives, incidentally, as Maritime Hobbies on Grafton Street.) As a kid I was fascinated by the Peppermint Lounge and its blinking neon candy cane, also clearly visible just a couple of doors further up the street. I have less recollection of the tavern on the opposite side of Barrington. Sadly, by the time I was old enough to get to know these legendary Halifax drinking dens more intimately, the Peppermint was gone.

Say what you will about the merits of Scotia Square, the streets it replaced were mourned by virtually no one at the time.

It's too bad that slum area fell into such disrepair--the Georgian proportions and massing of some of those residential blocks is great. I'm sure when they were initially built, those houses (the better ones, anyway) were of similar quality as what survives today. (I'm sure that they were in absolutely rotten shape when they were finally bulldozed though.)

I still definitely think that bulldozing the entirety of Barrington north of City Hall was nuts, though. Looks like there were some decent Victorian buildings, and more than that, it was clearly better from an urban perspective. Beats the the gloomy canyon we have now formed by Scotia Square and the Delta, and the interchange beyond that.

Fascinating. I have a vague memory of the Peppermint Lounge (mostly because of the sign I remember from when I was a kid, though I think my parents went there occasionally). That sign on the corner of Duke and Barrington for "The Trading Post" carried on somewhere else after, perhaps until very recently, didn't it? It looks so familiar. I also see a sign for what I assume is a Chinese restaurant, the Dragon House (?) next to the unnamed tavern, and what seems to be a Camille's Fish and Chips across the street on Barrington. Howards was a name I vaguely remember from the past though I can't remember if it was a ship chandler, a food wholesaler, a fishmonger... something along those lines.

Here is a picture recently posted on Facebook of the other end of Barrington from 1949 or so which I have not seen previously. Interesting to see the Green Lantern Building in a more productive time.

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...ps5uo7ia4t.jpg

Here is the plan for that rail complex Keith P. posted.
http://halifaxbloggers.ca/builthalif.../04/Pier-2.png

Great stuff, everyone. Really enjoying all the contributions and discussions.

Here's one from the Halifax archives, Buckingham Tavern on the corner of Buckingham and Barrington:

http://gencat1.eloquent-systems.com/..._5006186_1.jpg

Source:
http://gencat1.eloquent-systems.com/...ord=buckingham

And a couple more of the same area from Halifaxhistory.ca. That's the same building behind the heads of the fellows in the photos:

http://www.halifaxhistory.ca/buckingham01a.JPG

http://www.halifaxhistory.ca/buckingham02a.JPG

Source:
http://www.halifaxhistory.ca/other-photo.html

I hope someone can help me here. I lived from 1957 to 1966 in what I believe used to be officer's barracks on the corner of Brunswick and Gerrish streets. It was a 2 storey, wooden building with 4 apartments, and a huge set of steps under the overhang from the second floor apartments. This was diagonally across from the Old Dutch church. Please help!

Here is a copy-paste (no new information added) of a post I made about that area in another thread:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...143037&page=16

Found this photo on the wikipedia site about the Halifax explosion.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...C_ca._1900.jpg

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion

I was trying to figure out its exact location, which is difficult because so much has changed in the past 114 years. My first clue was the location of the Intercolonial Railway Station, visible in the upper left of the photo (at red arrow):

http://i62.tinypic.com/rtjdie.jpg

The Intercolonial station:

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/o...4/68172-v6.gif

Source:
http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discove...if&Ecopy=68172

To bring it home, I chanced across the 1894 map posted on the first page of the Old Halifax photos thread by skyscraper_1.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/histo...lifax_1894.jpg

The map clearly shows where the tracks fan out south of the dockyard, and the relative location of the Intercolonial Station.

So, from that, it appears to me that the photo is taken from the vantage point of somewhere around the red circle below:

http://i59.tinypic.com/fbw3lw.jpg

So, based on this information, using Bing Maps birdseye view, the general area today looks like this (red circle is a guess at the approximate photo location):

http://i57.tinypic.com/f2mnvm.jpg

Source:
http://binged.it/1ycGMtH

Great work, OldDartmouthMark!

Seems a shame to have most of that old ROW used simply for parking. Imagine a transit rail terminal just a bit south of your red circle on the last image to allow people from the suburbs to commute downtown and back again. Given the paranoia about security one doubts even an elevated line would be permitted to run over those lots now. What a shame.

The City archives has what seems to be tons of photographs that are not yet scanned. There was a reference to a treasure trove of pictures in the Planning and Development office files related to the development of Scotia Square. Many of them seemed to be of the area before demolition. The index is available digitally but not the pictures themselves.

I did find this one of the waterfront pre-Historic Properties with our old friend the Pentagon Building making another appearance. Interesting to see the area immediately adjacent with a number of large trees, could it have been a park of some sort? Seems odd.

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...psknvnriof.jpg

For spatial reference, this is the spot where you would find the north end of the Delta Barrington hotel, roughly where the pedway to Scotia Square crosses Barrington. Great picture. Interesting to note that the trolley ran on Buckingham.

Comparing the pics, could the Buckingham Tavern and the Peppermint Lounge be the same building? Hard to tell from the angle whether the Peppermint was on the corner or just in from the corner.

https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/83...538/vpAJHT.jpg

http://gencat1.eloquent-systems.com/..._5006186_1.jpg

As a side note, I'm wondering if the Buckingham Tavern sign was an animated lighted sign, where lights made it look like 'liquid' was flowing from the bottle at the top of the sign to the glass on the bottom... would be cheesy but cool... ;)