So the Ramia Group of Companies, the folks who brought us the Convention Centre, now want to tear down a landmark building just up the street at the base of Citadel Hill. This building began life in 1893 as a Salvation Army Citadel and most recently has been home to the Halifax Alehouse. Quite a journey. Who says that Halifax cannot embrace change?

Google Street View, 2018

I don’t usually have many feeling about the loss of individual buildings but this one is different:

• the Alehouse is part of a collection of buildings all designed by the office of architect Henry Busch.
• the Alehouse with other members of the Busch family forms a thin veneer of 19th century buildings along Brunswick Street that provide an edge or border to all the new development in lower town.

Let me show you more.

What a team!

Think of the “Alehouse” as a member of a team. Let’s call it Team Busch because all the members were designed in the office of architect Henry Busch, active from about 1860 until the end of that century. Many of the team are particular crowd pleasing favourites and all members do an important job. It’s a team.

The Busch buildings that survive show how Halifax transformed from an eighteenth-century wooden town to a brick and stone (fireproof) Victorian city. The buildings express the confidence of businesses and the strength of institutions that cared about the welfare and education of all citizens.

A clever city would be using this collection of buildings to engage residents and visitors in the story of how the community developed. Here is a whirlwind tour.

• The earliest work of Busch’s we know is the design of the Legislative Library in Province House in 1862. The best preserved Victorian public interior in Halifax.

NS Legislature Photo

• Until the mid-1870s Busch was in partnership with Henry Elliot and their firm was responsible for the group of commercial buildings on Prince Street between Hollis and Bedford Row. This is the last complete nineteenth century block in the downtown with shop fronts on a down street.

• The sandstone and Italianate-style Howard building, on the corner of Hollis, housed a dry goods store owned by a woman; very much the exception in 1865.

• • The city has already put considerable resources into saving an extraordinary Busch building, the 1888 Church of England Institute on Barrington Street (you might know it as the Khyber).

• The smallest Busch building is the Bandstand in the Public Gardens, commissioned to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.

• Brunswick Street below the Citadel was long a terrible slum that the city wanted to clean up. In the last third of the nineteenth century a number of institutions were built here to improve the neighbourhood and Busch designed all three of the buildings that survive. The oldest is the 1875 Halifax Visiting Dispensary at the corner of Prince. It provided free medical care aimed at poor women and children. The city morgue was conveniently located in the basement.

• Just down the block is the biggest Busch-designed building left in town: the Halifax Academy. This high school was built in 1879 and girls were first admitted in 1885.

• • The youngest building in this selection is the 1893 Salvation Army Citadel, the one proposed for demolition. My photo is from the 1970s when it contained a print shop and the brick was painted green. Folks are saying it is in not great condition now. I’d say it has not been in great condition for the last 50 years but still looks pretty good.

So do you get my drift here? The Alehouse is not a solitary treasure, it is part of a treasure trove of buildings all from the same architectural office that can be used to tell a fascinating story of how our city developed. Isn’t it amazing that in all our clearances such a collection has survived? Let’s not be the people that let this story be shortened.

A gift to the street

Now let’s consider the gifts our team member offers to the street. The Alehouse, to the left in the photo below, and the Dispensary to the right are Busch designed “gateposts” on either side of Prince Street and frame the  view down to the harbour. When you pass between the old brick buildings it feels special.

Google Street View, 2015

The view along Brunswick shows the wonderful rhythm of red brick of a similar scale: the Alehouse in the foreground, then the Dispensary, the Harbour Ridge apartments, and concealed by the tree another Busch designed building, the Halifax Academy.

Google Street View, 2018

Here is the view along Brunswick Street from the other direction. This time the red brick “gateposts” are the Cambridge Suites and the Academy marking the Sackville Street entrance to the downtown. The Alehouse is the last brick building in the distance on the left.

Google Street View, 2019

Other ways of doing business

The Harbour Ridge apartments (1990s, early 2000s?) pays homage to the Busch-designed buildings on either side. Here is an example of a developer making an effort to complete a streetscape that had not been finished a hundred years earlier. There had been nondescript wooden buildings on this site previously.

Google Street View, 2019

A block away on Sackville is a recent example of a developer taking great care to preserve the dignity of a nineteenth century brick building while building a midrise apartment beside and above. Doesn’t the old brick brighten up the street?

Google Street View, 2019

Conclusion 

The Alehouse /Salvation Army Citadel is a significant building both on its own and as a piece of the urban fabric. With sensitivity and imagination it can be part of a project that preserves the spirit of this section of Brunswick Street for another century.

Postscript

• The Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia has a petition you can sign if you support saving this building. It’s a small, easy, and meaningful thing you can do.
• A few years ago I led a Jane’s Walk that looked at the Busch-designed buildings mentioned here. Lots of people came out and it felt like an interesting way to walk from the lower city to the base of Citadel Hill. On visits to other cities we’ve often used an architecture lens to get a deeper sense of place: Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Chicago, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, and recently in Boston we used a map of brutalist-style buildings.
•  It’s sad when facades of old buildings are saved but they lose their life (I’m talking about you, Royal Bank on Water Street). But that does not have to be true. The Old Triangle Irish Alehouse occupies several of the Busch-designed buildings that are incorporated into Founders Square. It is an example of the liveliness and character that would make a new development of the old Salvation Army Citadel sing again.