General Updates and News

[IanWatson]

The old Coastal Cafe building is gone.

[kzt79]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

The CBC story on this was posted earlier in the proper Urban Design and Heritage forum.

My bad, I hadn't noticed.

[teddifax]

I see mentions of the Ralston Building site being approved is there something here on this
?

[alps]

Originally Posted by teddifax

I see mentions of the Ralston Building site being approved is there something here on this
?

There is a thread here:

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=237114&page=6

[someone123]

There is a new video by Halifax Walker exploring downtown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq7jQKg2gjo

I noticed it includes a view of the Tramway Building work:



I wonder if they will rebuild the "crenellations" that used to exist along the roof, and what the final colour will be. Not sure what the finish on this building was originally. There aren't a lot of old pictures and the ones I've seen from before the 80's or so are all black and white.

The 2-storey addition looks decent here and it's a good medium scale that doesn't seem too timid. It looks like this corner might end up being quite nice as the various projects wrap up. Skye will change the feel too and add some "depth". The Neptune looks a bit out of place now. Could it handle an addition of a few floors?

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by someone123

I wonder if they will rebuild the "crenellations" that used to exist along the roof, and what the final colour will be. Not sure what the finish on this building was originally. There aren't a lot of old pictures and the ones I've seen from before the 80's or so are all black and white.

The proposal for the project mentions the facade restoration as "partial," but that seemed to refer to uncertainity about whether the rustication underneath the brick storefront addition was still in good enough shape to be restored. It looks as it they are, in fact, restoring it, or at least re-revealing it. The crenellations/turrets are depicted in the project renderings, and mentioned in the site plan approval docs. I figure it may just be the last phase of the facade work? I certainly hope so.

[someone123]

It's an interesting piece of architectural history as a sort of missing link between older and newer architectural styles that uses concrete but still has some ornamentation. I think it's actually one of the more significant heritage buildings downtown even though it might not have been obvious.

There is a lot of nice detailing that has re-emerged and hopefully it'll be highlighted somehow with whatever final treatment happens (ground floor and the "boxes" between upper floors). None of that was visible in old streetview shots from before the work began. I would guess it was "modernized" circa 1960.

There are other buildings nearby that have lost ornamentation like the Pacific Building, Canada Permanent, and St. Paul's Building.

[OldDartmouthMark]

I had posted the pic below back in 2018. It's from the late 1950s and gives some idea of what the building looked like when it was around 40 years old. It's hard to tell if it had colour from the black and white photo, but it almost appears to have a natural finish, with the rectangular indentations highlighted with a darker colour. I can't recall finding any earlier photos, though I'm sure they exist.



https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showpost.php?p=8319806&postcount=2467

[teddifax]

Halifax Retails on it's FB page posted a picture of where the Coastal Cafe used to be, it shows the entire street frontage on Robie St., from May St. up to the old Bloomfield School is now vacant, just what is planned for here...? Please don't say another car dealership!

[Dmajackson]

^There are stakes in the ground showing the proposed building. It doesn't include the newly demolished buildings which are owned by HRM and will likely be used as a staging area for Robie Street widening construction and then sold off for development.

WM Fares - Robie + May

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=246942

[Jreeb]

Given Murex Realty owns the Coastal Café site - I wouldn't be surprised if there is a multi-res building planned for development once the rapid transit land gets negotiated.

[Arrdeeharharharbour]

The corner of Clifton St. and North St. Structure in the hole...

20231201_131251_HDR by AJ Forsythe, on Flickr

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by teddifax

Halifax Retails on it's FB page posted a picture of where the Coastal Cafe used to be, it shows the entire street frontage on Robie St., from May St. up to the old Bloomfield School is now vacant, just what is planned for here...? Please don't say another car dealership!

Speaking of the old Bloomfield School, I noticed yesterday that the 1919 building is showing clear signs of deterioration now, having been sitting neglected for so many years. I fear that the city’s lack of action on this site may have already sealed the fate of this historic building. It’s shameful, really.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark

Speaking of the old Bloomfield School, I noticed yesterday that the 1919 building is showing clear signs of deterioration now, having been sitting neglected for so many years. I fear that the city’s lack of action on this site may have already sealed the fate of this historic building. It’s shameful, really.

Lots of blame to share there, from the Imagine Bloomfield bunch who wanted it given over to community use (along with several big bags of money), the the NDP wanting it to develop affordable housing and then doing nothing to it, to HRM letting it decay until they sold it and allowed the developers to just sit on it until it reached its current sorry state.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark

Speaking of the old Bloomfield School, I noticed yesterday that the 1919 building is showing clear signs of deterioration now, having been sitting neglected for so many years. I fear that the city’s lack of action on this site may have already sealed the fate of this historic building. It’s shameful, really.

I’m kind of resigned that the most likely outcome seems at this point to be total demolition. Major failure by all parties—private and public—on this front. We’re needlessly losing a historic resource, and we’ve had this vacant scar in the middle of the neighbourhood for like 20 years, slowly deteriorating. Something will happen here eventually and I hope it’s great, but so far the failure to make something of this site is actually kind of amazing.

[someone123]

How much would it have cost to keep the buildings in OK shape and let community groups continue to operate there as they had in the past? Why do these sites get sold off and left to rot for decades instead of being maintained until it's time to develop? The development agreements can be hashed out while the buildings are maintained.

There seems to be a "perfect is the enemy of the good" problem and problems with reactionary policies such that there are people dying in tents but the city decides the old library is unusable for any purpose the day it's decommissioned. The mayor had said it needs something like $10M+ in renovations.

I don't really see the same scale of blighted public sites in most other cities aside from actual dying municipalities in the Rust Belt. The Palais de Justice debacle in Brussels has a similar political paralysis feel but is a grandiose structure that no doubt is very expensive to maintain.

[Drybrain]

It strikes me that Halifax seemed to turn a corner fairly recently, with privately owned historic sites suddenly enjoying a much better outlook than in the recent past. We’ve come a long way from just a few years ago, when it looked like both the Green Lantern and Elmwood would be lost, for example. The former has been restored, the latter is about to be, and we’ve also got the Tramway, the Dartmouth post office, the Waverley (hopefully, eventually), the Stairs House, etc.

But if a building is publicly owned, it becomes a victim of this ridiculous stasis.
The memorial library is one example, with the mayor and others on council talking about the building—which was occupied only eight years ago—as if it will require heroic efforts just to render habitable. And while Bloomfield is privately owned now, its current state is mostly the result of years of indifferent treatment in public hands (and even more recently, the city failing to ensure that the current prevents continued decay).

The Forum appears to probably be escaping this fate, but it too has had to endure years of hemming and hawing.

Seems like if you want to save a historic building in the current environment, sell it to a developer.

[Summerville]

From my experience, bureaucrats and politicians are indifferent to these buildings. They aren’t “owners” in the true-est sense. This is work and a building that needs repairs is a pain in the 🞵🞵🞵🞵.

But they are paralyzed by nimby’s and special interest groups and they literally leave the door open in fear of making the wrong decision,…the decision that will create bad press….and perhaps generate more work.

And the buildings rot until they become human health hazards which is the popular reference that politicians turn to when put on the hot seat.

The one thing that the Forum has going for it is that it has a Board that cares about the building.

Bloomfield was doomed on the day that the city decided to stop using it as a rec centre.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

The former has been restored, the latter is about to be, and we’ve also got the Tramway, the Dartmouth post office, the Waverley (hopefully, eventually), the Stairs House, etc.

It's also very easy to fixate on a few major sites like Bloomfield while it is harder to keep track of the average maintenance level for a bunch of small houses and commercial buildings around the city. I don't know which way things are going overall but from following pictures online I see a lot of nice smaller projects and fewer suburban-style duds being built in the urban core.

In general all of the older and nicer houses on the peninsula are going to be premium real estate from now on, purchased by wealthy people (20 years ago, most of those areas were not). The exception will be properties purchased for development. But there will be fewer and fewer run-down buildings owned by people who can't afford to maintain them or rented out as slum properties.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Summerville

From my experience, bureaucrats and politicians are indifferent to these buildings. They aren’t “owners” in the true-est sense. This is work and a building that needs repairs is a pain in the 🞵🞵🞵🞵.

I can't remember which councillor it was but there was always some guy from the suburbs who would talk about how every old building needed to be torn down. He said this of the Kelly Building on Granville which if it had been kept around for a few more years would have gone well with the TD tower redo (which turned out nicely in any case but would have been slightly better).

Part of what's strange I guess is even the local or downtown councillors don't seem to champion these things much, or have any connection to the buildings themselves. I get your point about their focus, but I don't find that other cities are like this as much. I'd say Halifax might be slightly worse in this area than Toronto for example, and Toronto is supposed to be a very business and growth focused city. I'd say Halifax might be behind Vancouver as well. In more heritage-oriented towns like in Quebec or elsewhere in Atlantic Canada there is a lot more preservation.

One thing I notice is there is a perpetual narrative of economic pressure that gives ammo to the "tear it down" crowd. In recent years it seamlessly flipped from "we aren't growing so we can't have nice things" to "we have growth pressure so we can't have nice things". There's a lot of overlap in the groups who would have called for suburban box stores on the peninsula in 1998 and those who say all the old buildings should be torn down today because of the urgent need of housing (many YIMBYs are in that group).