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Originally Posted by someone123
The North End in Halifax (and/or "Central Halifax") is becoming a really interesting place. It always had good bones, but it used to feel sparse and shabby. I liked it in the past because of its potential but now it is actually becoming a great neighbourhood.
One of the keys seems to be the fine-grained, local, organic nature of the growth that's happening there. Instead of a few condo projects done by large developers, there have been a ton of small improvements dispersed over a larger area, and a lot of these have been driven by the growth of local businesses. The North End isn't just a bedroom community. It's got a pretty decent economic base too.
Agricola's a bit subtler because most of the projects there are just renos, but there was a time when Gottingen looked like the victim of a WWII-era bombing campaign. It started to see a little bit of regrowth about 10 years ago and now it's rapidly becoming a normal inner-city commercial street.
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In many ways the North End is turning (back) into a Jane Jacobs-esque idyllic-if-slightly-chaotic mixed-use neighbourhood. It's interesting that the South and West Ends each have a primary commercial street (Spring Garden and Quinpool, respectively) which are dominated by commercial uses, as well as a few secondary commercial streets which are largely residential but with a significant commercial presence (eg. South Park, Queen, Inglis in the South End, Chebucto and Mumford in the West End).
In the North End, there isn't really one primary commercial street, but rather four parallel secondary commercial streets - Gottingen, Agricola, Robie, and Windsor. Each of them is developing in its own style (Gottingen ~ counterculture, Agricola ~ hipster/yuppie, Robie ~ mainstream, Windsor ~ hippies/retirees) but the common thread is ground floor retail (often in converted houses), locally-based businesses, and generally tightly-packed, small-scale redevelopments and infill. Robie near Young Street will probably be the outlier in the near future with several larger-scale projects in the works. Aside from Gottingen, these streets also differ from Quinpool and Spring Garden by being tangential to downtown rather than being direct extensions of it.
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And it's been years since I last went to Quebec. (I actually was in Ste-Foy for business last month, but then got back southwest. Haven't set foot downtown for years.)
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