I think I’ll blog a little more on it later when I have more time, but this Christmas, I had the opportunity to spend time out east in Halifax. It was the first time I had been that far east, the first time I had ever seen the ocean, and the first time that Christmas travels didn’t mean heading up to Timmins. As Dartmouth (Cole Harbour, really) is her homeland, Kathleen and her family were more than happy to show me around. As always, if you take a look at my photos section, you can see some of what I was looking at.
There are many things that I’d like to research, but so far as I can tell, online and searchable sources (ie. newspapers) for the city’s history (particularly for the mid-20th century) are not quite as readily available as I have become used to. Nonetheless, I have a quick little Then & Now for the Dartmouth Shopping Centre above.
Apparently, much like the case in Ottawa, Halifax stubbornly held on to its early closing bylaw when its surrounding municipalities either never implemented one or long after they did. In any event, after the completion of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge (“The Old Bridge”) in the mid-1950s, like Nepean here, Dartmouth benefited from the more liberal retail arrangement. Since the bridge virtually deposited Darkside-bound motorists into its parking lot once it opened in 1956, the Dartmouth Shopping Centre reputedly fared quite well.1It didn’t hurt that it was one of the two first suburban malls in Nova Scotia and a bit of a novelty. The other? Bayers Road Shopping Centre, immortalized to this out-of-towner by Joel Plaskett. See Bruktawit B. Melles, The Relationship Between Policy, Planning and Neighbourhood Change: The Case of the Gottingen Street Neighbourhood, 1950-2000 (MA Thesis: Dalhousie University, 2003): 34. Also see this thread on Skyscraper Page for discussion. That is, at least until the Mic Mac Mall was completed in 1973.
Notes
| ↥1 | It didn’t hurt that it was one of the two first suburban malls in Nova Scotia and a bit of a novelty. The other? Bayers Road Shopping Centre, immortalized to this out-of-towner by Joel Plaskett. See Bruktawit B. Melles, The Relationship Between Policy, Planning and Neighbourhood Change: The Case of the Gottingen Street Neighbourhood, 1950-2000 (MA Thesis: Dalhousie University, 2003): 34. Also see this thread on Skyscraper Page for discussion. |
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