Quote:
Originally Posted by isaidso
For all we know, Halifax may develop into a major city 100 years from now. A new modern downtown might rise with no height restrictions at the foot of the McKay Bridge overlooking the Bedford Basin. The current downtown might end up being to Halifax what Old Quebec/Old Montreal is to Quebec City/Montreal; increasingly a museum frozen in time.
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The sad thing is that if this happens the old part of downtown Halifax will be a haphazard mix of heritage buildings and stumpy modern highrises. It would have been much better if the old lower streets were preserved like old Quebec or Montreal and new buildings in the 1960's and later had gone around the Spring Garden Road or Gottingen areas.
The old Halifax that should have been fully preserved:
I completely agree with the sentiment that there's no point in knocking down these old buildings for mediocre modern structures that are heavily compromised by height limits. It would have made more sense to demolish less and build taller. Or demolish nothing and build somewhere else.
One interesting point is that heritage advocates saw height limits as promoting preservation by reducing the economic incentive to demolish (theoretically the gain from demolishing an old 4 storey building to replace it with a new 4 storey building is much lower than the gain from replacing it with a highrise). In practice the economics and timing of these regulations didn't work out at all and it would have been far better to focus directly on protecting heritage instead of trying to remove development pressure. Part of the ineffectiveness can probably be blamed on the unholy alliance between heritage advocates and BANANAs.
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