Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
The Vintage Halifax page on Facebook offers this pic. Sadly, no interior pic of the theater itself. I'd love to see one.
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Great photo. I'd also love to see an interior view. I remember Cinema Scotia Square as a very comfortable, classy theatre, with fine acoustics. Of course when built it was to replace the late, lamented Capitol, a reduction from 2000 seats to almost 800. Still a large auditorium by today's standards. (The Oxford has 340 seats; the largest auditorium at Bayers Lake has 336.)
For its first couple of decades Scotia Square had two levels with quite diverse retail and entertainment choices. As a kid I loved shopping for models and trains at the large Maritime Hobbies store on the upper mall.
One unique design feature was that the standard store front had generic text-based signs to identify the tenant: no logos or designer fonts were allowed. I guess it was meant to convey an elegant, homogeneous appearance but it may ultimately have helped to discourage traffic.
I'm still somewhat surprised that the downtown retail environment could fail so dramatically over the span of a few decades.
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