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).
Quote:
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. |
Quote:
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. |
Quote:
|
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. |
Quote:
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: Quote:
|
Quote:
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. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
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. |
Quote:
|
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 |
Quote:
PS: I wonder if GMMR was thinking of "Warden of the North" when writing Game of Thrones. :D |
Quote:
|
Nice pics but totally irrelevant as compared to the slums that were dozed in Halifax back in the 50s and 60s. I saw them
|
Quote:
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') |
Quote:
|
Quote:
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! |
Quote:
Edit: It occurs to me that this would be a cool name for a new bar... "The Drinking Den" :D |
Quote:
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. |
Quote:
|
All times are GMT. The time now is 8:28 AM. |
Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.