Italianate Palazzos on Hollis

June 14, 2022 Stephen Archibald

In the 1860s the commercial gentry of Halifax filled the downtown with palaces of business constructed in a style reminiscent of the palazzos of merchant princes of renaissance Florence, Rome or Venice. This flamboyant Italianate style of architecture was a display of wealth and power at a moment of prosperity in the city. In early… Read More

Howe Now

April 25, 2022 Stephen Archibald

Sheila and I keep a soft-sided mental list of areas around town that would be good to walk. Many of these are districts we drive through but have no reason to experience on foot. Here are notes from one of those rambles. On a sunny Sunday morning we started with brunch at the atmospheric Armview.… Read More

Noticed: Good News & Triggers

April 6, 2022 Stephen Archibald

On Sunday I wandered downtown for the first time in a while. The city was surprisingly busy and everything felt somehow bigger. Can't explain that. Here's some other things noticed. The Granville Street side of the Dennis Building is trussed with a giant steel structure that reminds us of a time when engineering could be… Read More

Old Album, Number Sixteen: Barrington Street Looking Up

March 22, 2022 Stephen Archibald

Here's a group of images taken in 1976-77 of the upper stories of buildings in the business blocks of Barrington Street. It was a confusing, liminal period when the street was changing; we could still remember when it was a vibrant commercial district, but the future was unclear. Yet if you looked above the tawdry,… Read More

Old Album, Number Fifteen: Barrington Central Tee

March 9, 2022 Stephen Archibald

In the 1970s I kept returning to the intersection of Barrington and Spring Garden to take pictures of the three iron fences that line the corner where two of our historic commercial streets meet. My favourite of the fences, in front of St. Matthews, has a row of flowers that could easily be converted to… Read More

Old Album, Number Fourteen: Barrington Street South

February 22, 2022 Stephen Archibald

This collection is photos taken in Halifax in the 1970s, of buildings on Barrington Street heading north from South Street. In the 19th century this was Pleasant Street, the road to Point Pleasant. A brick building at the corner of Barrington and South never seemed to attract much attention. I think it might have housed… Read More

Old Album, Number Thirteen: Morris Street

February 4, 2022 Stephen Archibald

This is the thirteenth album selected from my little collection of photos. Just some shots of buildings on a couple of blocks of Morris Street. Morris Street is a useful east-west Halifax thoroughfare that probably doesn't get the respect it deserves. It retains many fine older buildings, and the new ones are so bland I… Read More

Old Album, Number Twelve: Detail, Detail

January 27, 2022 Stephen Archibald

This is the twelfth album selected from my little collection of photos. These images are architectural details around Halifax photographed in the 1970s and early 80s and are arranged generally by the age of the objects. When I rambled downtown Halifax in the 1970s and 80s the photos I took were often of architectural details,… Read More

Making the best impression

January 20, 2022 Stephen Archibald

Recently on Twitter I posted some photos of the backs of 18th-century gravestones in St. Paul's Cemetery in Halifax. The photos were taken in 1977 when I happened to visit the old burying ground at a moment when bright sunlight accentuated the patterns of tool marks created by the stone carvers. To my surprise over… Read More

Old Album, Number Eleven: An Abundance of Gables

January 10, 2022 Stephen Archibald

This is the eleventh album selected from my little collection of photos, arranged in more or less chronological order. These slides were taken in the 1970s and early 80s. I started snapping photos of old shops while I was working on the restoration project at Sherbrooke Village. The images were useful visual references as we… Read More