[OldDartmouthMark]

I think the Argyle and Sackville sides have come along nicely. I can say from personal experience that the new Gahan is a nice space - open, well decorated with some decent views of Argyle Street below from its window seats. Of course it doesn't hurt that its food and beer are pretty decent as well.

IMHO, the Nova Centre appears to be an overall plus for the area, and will be interesting once the hotel opens.

It's not without its flaws, however, as the Prince Street side has virtually nothing to offer passers-by except the entrance to Rogers Square (Grafton Street reimagined). The Market Street side is a total dead zone, though maybe that will change when the hotel entrance opens up on the southwest side. The Sackville Street side is a little more inviting and well lit, though.

The Rogers Square area is a disappointment currently. It still feels dank and dark and and kind of odd with the video screens providing a good portion of the lighting, but with typically not much of interest playing on the video and audio devices. I almost expect a Max Headroom (look it up) kind of character to appear...

The fact that it is also an entrance and exit to the parking garage takes away from it being pedestrian friendly as well. If you don't watch out you invariably will be in the way of a vehicle trying to get in/out of the building. I expect that traffic to increase exponentially once the hotel is opened.

On the parking topic, I decided to try it out last month, as I figured it's a convenient location, and hey... why not? What I found was a somewhat cavernous parking garage that had no clearly marked directions to be able to get to an exit that you could actually use. There were a couple of elevators that would have taken you into the Nova Centre but were not available to use for the public, so we, along with a group of other confused people who also chose to park there but couldn't find a way out, found ourselves walking around trying to understand how we could get outside. Finally, I had to use the speaker to security to ask how to get out, and even then it was not so easy to find the elevators that take you up to the bank area in Rogers dank dark hole, apparently the only exit acceptable to use for the general public. I shudder to think how one would get out of there in the event of an emergency.

With all that said, it is a nice, large parking garage, and knowing the layout will make things easier in the future. Make sure you bring your credit card, because that's the only accepted method of payment, and make sure you're OK with spending $20 to park there for a few hours. It's definitely not the cheapest place to park in the downtown.

But yes, the Argyle Street section at the southwest corner of the building is coming along nicely with restaurants and pubs. The rest of Argyle Street is taken up by the Convention Centre entrance and the BMO (which seems like a strange location for a bank), so there's not much of interest as the Convention Centre is always closed to the public, and I don't go to Argyle Street to do my banking.