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Originally Posted by someone123
Those HRM archives are a great find.
I guess this is mostly preaching to the choir, but it's regrettable how many great heritage buildings were lost. In those photos there are 4 or 5 buildings like Morse's Teas that have since been demolished, and a whole bunch of 4-6 storey brick and stone office blocks. Instead of the big redevelopment plans of the 1950's and 60's, it would have been better to do more piecemeal redevelopment and heritage preservation. Downtown could have still had lots of new buildings, and traffic would have been no worse than now.
We're still making more or less the same mistakes with the demolition of buildings like BMO or the former Maritime Life at Spring Garden and Queen. In the future people will wonder why that was torn down, and it turns out there isn't really a good reason other than poor planning. There's a bunch of empty land a block away.
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While there are certainly a few buildings in those pictures that would have been nice to preserve, what struck me in scrolling through the collection is just how awful a good part of downtown actually was in the 1960s. It was a great refresh of memories that were stored away in my mind from my very young years driving through the area with my parents. It was mostly very old. run-down, dirty, ramshackle wooden buildings of one sort of another, combined with some very utilitarian and uninteresting newer buildings. Even the older ones of more character were in dire need of maintenance or repair and were not desirable places. The only real value was in the land. Nobody saw any great value or reason to keep those structures and there was a general feeling that Halifax needed to move on with the times. Of course we got that wrong too, pulling out before the job could be completed and left with a downtown that is a mishmash of newer and older which is difficult to get to and from.