The first thing you notice about Halifax is its architecture. The neighborhood where I presently live is filled with these tiny, quaint, brightly painted colonial-style townhouses. Most are decades old, and probably push the century mark. In Vancouver, any such houses have long been demolished by rezoning laws and replaced by more modern architectural styles and property sizes.
These colonial-style remnants are everywhere. They literally dot the cityscape, constituting the bulk of every housing estate. Many are protected from demolition by city laws; they are designated as “Heritage Houses”. As a result, most streets in Halifax look like stereotypical reconstructions of those neighborhoods in blaxploitation movies, where black teenagers lounge on porch steps and suck back on doobies- except the loungers are white college students.
Between rows of these townhouses, Halifax’s high-rises rise up: university centers, business buildings, hospitals, etc. But even here, the differences from downtown Vancouver’s visually-stunning “City of Glass” theme are evident.
Halifax’s building styles range from mostly squat, functional, Soviet-style architecture to a few space-age, ultra-modern architectural conceptions. The problem with the latter is that these conceptions of “modern buildings” look like they should be the subject of exam questions for drafting students. It’s as though the architects of these buildings set out to create buildings for 2007 with a circa-1977 conception of what buildings in 2007 would look like.
The combination of the colonial, the functional, and the space-age in Halifax’s architecture left me with the peculiar notion that Halifax had once started on the road to modernity and then given up halfway, leaving the city stuck somewhere between the industrial age and the ultra-modern age it had once aspired to but never quite achieved.
This was interesting to me, but it was only until I combined it with other observations about the city that a coherent theme started to emerge.
For one thing, Halifax, and Atlantic Canada in general, is obsessed with the past. Halifax in particular focuses on two historical sources of pride: its contributions to the World Wars, and its rich maritime tradition as a foremost port in the British Empire. If I took a photo of every war memorial or ocean-themed structure in the city, I would need to buy another 20 gig memory card.
There’s a Memorial Rd here and a Veteran’s Highway there. There are monuments in almost every public square, park, cemetery, waterfront and university campus, each honoring the dead from WWI, WWII, and the Korean War. On the flip side, there’s a Lord Nelson Hotel and two maritime museums, and dozens of nautical references from the age of sail. The license plates bear a schooner and read: “Canada’s Ocean Playground.” Some even combine the two: there are two huge monuments memorializing the war dead in Point Pleasant Park- one for the merchant marine and the other for the Royal Canadian navy.
For another thing, Halifax is a grave new world. There are graveyards everywhere, and it is hard to describe the uneasy disquiet forced upon my senses as I stumbled across three or four huge, decaying cemeteries in a 10-block radius- each situated in prime real estate at the city’s heart. One was for rich Protestants, the final resting place of Haligonian founding families. One was reserved for the Irish Catholics; faded gravestones etched with names like “Kelly” and “Gleeson”. One was for freemasons, whose graves were covered with flying skulls and unusual necronomicons sacred to those clandestine brotherhoods. I laughed, and joked morbidly that surely there are no social divisions in Heaven and Hell.
Anyway, here’s my grand observation- the link between the graves, the focus on the past, and the mismatched combination of particular architectural styles.
Halifax looks this way because Halifax is dying.
In general, the Maritimes are as well. Anyone can tell you that the regional economy has been stagnant for years. Everywhere, you can see billboards of election promises to revive the region, and hear stories about the exodus of the youth, who move west as soon as they graduate.
There is little growth in jobs, and so there is no increased housing demand- no one wants to come, and everyone leaves to find jobs elsewhere. In turn, there is no demand for property to redevelop and turn into new housing estates and business centers. I marveled at the existence of those quaint colonial houses and huge graveyards because they could scarcely exist in huge boomtowns- they would be considered relics and a waste of useful space. In Singapore, graveyards are being exhumed en masse to make room for new housing apartments and business buildings. In Vancouver, British-style properties are being demolished to make way for huge luxury homes to lure in wealthy Asian immigrants. Vancouver’s city planners cultivate the architecture and layout of the city’s downtown core to advertise Vancouver as a first-rate residential area and economic center, and would never abide by Halifax’s bizarre Star Trek constructions. A vibrant economy changes old landscapes, and the presence of the latter in Halifax means that it doesn’t have the former.
And this takes us to the focus on the past. There is a general air of pleasant pessimism permeating Atlantic Canada, like a gracefully aging woman who knows that no amount of cosmetics will shade the harsh truth that her prime is over. The only option is to remember the glory days with fondness and longing- her great seafaring traditions, war contributions, and participation in British imperialism and the early days of Confederation. This is a region that lives in the past because it has no future.
Most Atlantic Canadians would probably scoff, and retort that they have a healthy respect for their forefathers’ endeavors. But those days are past now, and in the past they will remain. Other provinces don’t have such a narrow, clingy, almost desperate focus on the past. Calgary and Vancouver have war memorials and colonial relics, but there is an air of modernity and dynamism. Meanwhile, the Atlantic region is quaint, peaceful, and reminiscent- like the garden of a museum. History shows that a people never cling so desperately to their old traditions as when they have no clear path to the future.
I have often been accused of trying to find the cloud in every silver lining. Well, tomorrow, I will treat myself to the hospitality of an East Coast pub... and the day after that I may be standing on the cliffs over the Bay of Fundy with the ocean winds curling fingers over my head. And perhaps I will remember that whatever the future may bring, an imperishable joy of life and wild beauty yet remains in this place.
But today, I feel a little sad. Today, Halifax feels in many ways like the graves and statues she contains: a monument to a way of life that is slowly but surely fading into memory.
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