Quote:
Originally Posted by TorontoDrew
This looks very Vancouver(ish) in this setting.
|
Geographically the two cities are similar. The downtown areas are on peninsulas. False Creek is analogous to the Northwest Arm and the Halifax harbour and basin side are like Burrard Inlet. The Vancouver features are smaller and Vancouver is bigger so the urban core spills out more beyond the peninsula.
North Vancouver and Dartmouth are geographically similar but have a different feel. Dartmouth is the "other side". It's like a hybrid of North Vancouver and Surrey. The parts of Halifax like the nicer parts of North and West Vancouver are along the mainland side of the Northwest Arm (Armdale, Purcell's Cove).
The highest elevation in Halifax is only around 200 m while mountains near Vancouver get to over 1200 m.
The Annapolis Valley is Halifax's Fraser Valley but it's separated from the city by 30 km or so of rocky land that is sparsely populated (this gap was a big deal in 1700). The Sackville River is sort of the Halifax equivalent of the Fraser River but it is tiny. When water transportation was still important, the Shubenacadie canal system linked up the city with the Annapolis Valley and Bay of Fundy (Vancouver didn't exist during this era; it was a product of the railways).
Had Halifax had a big river like the Fraser and had the agricultural areas been a bit closer and more extensive, it would have probably been a much larger city by 1800 or so. Arguably that would have made the nicest city location on the eastern seaboard. It still wouldn't have been a gateway to the continental interior though. Its trajectory would have been like that of New Orleans, but with fewer problems in recent decades.
Prev
Linear Mode
