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  #21  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2014, 2:44 AM
Spire Spire is offline
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Originally Posted by Colin May View Post
A concert hall is not a performing arts venue. Great concert halls are expensive, good concert halls are expensive. Multi purpose concert halls rarely work, too many compromises to meet the needs of different groups.
A venue with several buildings would be the best, and expensive solution.
I often wonder about the operating costs and revenue of the various facilities, Spatz auditorium, Alderney Landing, the auditoria (?) in schools.
Very true. There is some misinformation out there that the Cohn was originally designed as a lecture hall, not a concert hall. Having looked at the original design documents and promotional material, it is clear that it was designed first and foremost as a concert hall, and it's a pretty good one at that - apart from the fact that the acoustics are a little too dry, and the seating capacity is a little on the small side. Would it be great to have a new one? Yes, especially considering the Cohn is constantly booked wall-to-wall with events.

As someone who's worked tech for theatre shows in various performing arts venues around HRM, and knows people who have worked in most of them, there are very few venues that could be called "perfect," that's for sure.

The Bella Rose and Spatz Theatres lack in technical capabilities, fly towers, and sufficient wing space, especially compared to previous auditoriums in St. Pat's and QEH - the Spatz doesn't even have a stage right wing! Guess everyone's going to have to enter the set from stage left. They made do with the resources they had when designing and building them, but they both come off as kind of half-assed. The Bella Rose is a step above the Spatz, at least.

Neptune's Fountain Hall is a well-designed, classic space, but the stage is far too small for some of the productions Neptune puts on, especially for some of the big musical numbers involving choreography. Considering this is Halifax's "premiere" theatre company, I wish they had a bigger main stage...

The best venue in the city for theatre and dance, in my opinion, is the James Dunn Theatre in the Dalhousie Arts Centre - the largest proscenium arch stage in Halifax, by far, and one of the largest in Atlantic Canada, massive wing space, stage elevators, a 45-foot fly tower, well-designed backstage and technical facilities...it's that rare situation where they got everything right. The only downside (and it's a big one) is the small seating capacity (around 200), and lack of wide availability for outside productions due to its use by Dal's Fountain School of Performing Arts, but the stadium seating means the sightlines are perfect.

Fun fact...the Dunn has also been rented out as a makeshift soundstage for films - the Pierce Brosnan miniseries "Bag of Bones" used it for this purpose...

Last edited by Spire; Nov 29, 2014 at 3:00 AM.
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  #22  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2014, 2:47 AM
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ns_kid ns_kid is offline
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Originally Posted by Waye Mason View Post
The attempt to remove the stadium from the list was not successful. There is still money possibly on the table, but not enough to build a CFL stadium.
I don't know of anyone who believes council should put enough "money on the table" to build a "CFL stadium". I believe there are many who think it would be quite appropriate for the city to show leadership in bringing the partners together to build a 'right-sized' stadium for this city, or concert venue for that matter.

That a city with our population and our demographics cannot support even a modest athletic stadium and/or a large concert facility strikes me as bizarre. I have a hard time getting past the fact that there are four universities in this city with athletic programs including football, soccer, and track; they cannot find the wherewithal to cooperate to advance the development of a community stadium. I find it perplexing that council is apparently not ready to lead, as Ottawa did when it attracted private sector partners to revitalize a decaying precinct, at the same time rebuilding a stadium that was well used, not just for pro football, but also for soccer, university sports, and open-air concerts.

I recently had a chance to visit Seattle and spent quite a bit of time in and around the remarkable Seattle Center complex. Seattle Center is a massive site that includes a 12,000-seat stadium, a 17,000 seat arena, a 2900-seat concert hall, five theatres, parkland, museums, galleries, restaurants and many more attractions. It's a recreation and arts showpiece that has -- to be clear -- developed over more than fifty years.

Oh, if we could dream of creating even a small facsimile of such a site in Halifax. Of course in our poor little city we could never hope to build such a thing. Not even a shadow of it. Not a chance.

Just incidentally, the Shannon Park lands are 82 acres, compared to Seattle Center's 74 acres. Halifax's metro population is 400,000; Seattle's is 652,000. Halifax's median total household income is $80,490 CAD (2012 census). Seattle's is $62,195 USD (2010 census). Halifax's unemployment rate is 6% (NSLabour Force Survey: Oct. 2014); Seattle's is 5.1% (USDofL: Sept 2014)

So what really holds us back anyway?
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  #23  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2014, 1:06 PM
terrynorthend terrynorthend is offline
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Originally Posted by ns_kid View Post

That a city with our population and our demographics cannot support even a modest athletic stadium and/or a large concert facility strikes me as bizarre. I have a hard time getting past the fact that there are four universities in this city with athletic programs including football, soccer, and track; they cannot find the wherewithal to cooperate to advance the development of a community stadium.

I recently had a chance to visit Seattle and spent quite a bit of time in and around the remarkable Seattle Center complex. Seattle Center is a massive site that includes a 12,000-seat stadium, a 17,000 seat arena, a 2900-seat concert hall, five theatres, parkland, museums, galleries, restaurants and many more attractions. It's a recreation and arts showpiece that has -- to be clear -- developed over more than fifty years.


Just incidentally, the Shannon Park lands are 82 acres, compared to Seattle Center's 74 acres. Halifax's metro population is 400,000; Seattle's is 652,000. Halifax's median total household income is $80,490 CAD (2012 census). Seattle's is $62,195 USD (2010 census). Halifax's unemployment rate is 6% (NSLabour Force Survey: Oct. 2014); Seattle's is 5.1% (USDofL: Sept 2014)
I absolutely agree with your first point, and the Seattle development sounds fantastic for sure... but Seattle's metro pop is 3.6 million.

Last edited by terrynorthend; Nov 29, 2014 at 6:31 PM.
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  #24  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2014, 9:19 PM
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Originally Posted by terrynorthend View Post
I absolutely agree with your first point, and the Seattle development sounds fantastic for sure... but Seattle's metro pop is 3.6 million.
Yes, it's more like a Montreal-sized city. There are also some really wealthy people and companies in that area that donate a lot of money. Bill Gates is a prime example. Then again, I would say that public planning in Seattle and Washington state is even more dysfunctional than in NS because a lot of stuff is funded by state-wide ballot initiative and there is a huge urban-rural divide. Seattle's transit system is very weak for a city of its size and that is directly related to their inability to coordinate big public projects. San Francisco is pretty bad too; they have bizarrely gold-plated bits of disjoint infrastructure that don't fit together in a coherent way because plans and funding there are not dependable. Anyway, I'm going off on a bit of a tangent but I guess my point is that Seattle does a good job of building stuff like shiny one-off cultural buildings that are appealing to private donors but the city is arguably worse than Halifax at transit and urban planning, which is hard to believe.

It feels to me like the concert hall is the same as transit, the stadium, Cogswell, and everything else. There's a huge number of regional "priorities" debated ad nauseam in Halifax. Most commonly when a project is focused on and completed I think it's because it has a champion with some kind of authority and ideally a good deal of related knowledge. Maybe the mayor will be able to push for the stadium and Cogswell.

Unfortunately there also seems to be a lot of conservatism in Halifax. People default to being closed-minded and negative about new projects and they balk at a scale of investment that would seem perfectly normal in other cities. Here in Vancouver for example $1B+ transit projects every few years are seen as normal and necessary. Halifax is 1/5 or 1/6 the size of Vancouver. If you were to propose even a single $100-200M transit project in Halifax it would be seen as outlandishly ambitious. It's no wonder why transit there is so much worse than in other cities when the scale of investment is proportionally much smaller.

Last edited by someone123; Nov 29, 2014 at 9:37 PM.
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