Quote:
Originally Posted by MPotter
Here is a photo I took last fall in the Scotia Square parkade. I wonder if the cobblestones in the photo are part of the old Buckingham Street or perhaps Jacob Street?
I would be interested to learn more about them.
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Hey that's pretty cool! I can't recall seeing that detail before.
Can you give us an idea of the orientation/location of that photo?
Following is an exercise I went through to determine whether it is plausible that those cobblestones could be part of the original street surface of Buckingham Street. Follow along below for the process...
Firstly, I overlaid a 1962 map on the current Google map to show the approximate position of the old street grid compared to today:
Next, I sketched out approximate locations of old streets onto an overhead view of Scotia Square from Google Maps:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@44.64937.../data=!3m1!1e3
If you zoom into the "Buckingham Street Corridor" area of Scotia Square, you can see picnic tables, one of which is also visible at the top of your photo. I'm assuming that this is perhaps the approximate location of your photo?
https://www.google.ca/maps/@44.64978.../data=!3m1!1e3
Now, if you look at some 1945 photos of the intersection between Buckingham Street and Argyle Street, you can see that there once was cobblestones there:
Caption: Argyle St. at Buckingham, looking north-north-east
Sept. 21, 1945 (102-16N-0016.27)
Caption: Argyle St. looking north from just south of Buckingham St.
Sept. 21, 1945 (102-16N-0016.26)
These are from the Halifax Municipal Archives site (search word: Buckingham):
Halifax Municipal Archives
A few observations:
(1) The original intersection as shown in the photos is at somewhat of a slope and there are trolley tracks at that location - both of these features are not visible in your photo.
(2) The location of the intersection appears to be a little too southward to be located right next to the picnic tables (if they are the same ones), though it appears that the cobblestones ran the length of Buckingham at the time.
(3) The cobblestones in the photos run in 2 directions, depending on their proximity to the tracks. Again not a feature that is visible in your photo.
(4) It seems likely that the cobblestones would have been paved over sometime in the 1950s or 1960s as seen in later photos of Buckingham Street.
Checking into it a little further, from the Scotia Square construction photos (also from the Municipal Archives), you can see that the surfaces and below-grade areas of Argyle and Buckingham Streets were removed during construction:
My best guess would be that they may have saved original cobblestones from that area and laid them there during finish construction - though it seems like an odd place to put them...
Thanks for posting the photo - it shows a very intriguing feature of Scotia Square that I had not been aware of.