Early Saturday morning, while on the way to the farmers' markets, I realized it was a perfect moment to pause and walk around the outside of the brand new LeMarchant-St. Thomas Elementary school. This joyfully contemporary collection of colourful shapes sits comfortably at the bottom of LeMarchant Street. The new building is on the site… Read More

The Granville Street Mall in downtown Halifax is lined with many outstanding buildings. Virtually all date from 1860 when they were quickly built after a devastating fire cleared this area of Barrington, Granville, and Hollis streets. This was the premier shopping district, and the merchants commissioned new stores designed in the highest styles of the… Read More

Sobeys announced they will stop providing plastic grocery bags by the end of this year. That didn't bother us because reusable bags, forever. More interesting was the suggestion, seen on Twitter, that people should save a plastic Sobeys bag as a collector's item. In the 1970s and 80s, several of my ephemera friends were active… Read More

A few days ago Chris Miller tweeted this very urban image of Halifax. The red building brightening up all that grayness made me remember a William Carlos Williams poem about a red wheelbarrow.So I quickly looked up the poem and tweeted the beginning as a reply, replacing "wheelbarrow" with "building." so much depends upon a… Read More

In April I was coming out of Atlantic News and noticed that the building across the street was being stripped of its many layers of siding. I posted a picture on Twitter and wished good things for a building that had lost its dignity a long time ago. The Twitter post gathered 10,000 impressions so… Read More

So the car was in for servicing (remember the diesel that VW lied about), so there was time to take a long ramble. I didn't have a destination in mind and just started walking quickly down Robie Street, then turned up May Street for a slower-paced stroll in a zone with more visual charms. Immediately… Read More

While looking through photos taken last month, I noticed a little theme: new public landscape elements, with thoughtful design, located in communities several counties distant from Halifax. Here are three examples. Mersey Skatepark In early June the Rhododendron Society did its annual garden tour, this year in the Liverpool area. One of the stops was… Read More

A couple of years ago I came upon a delightful Instagram account that posted pictures of fruit stickers. This was a bit shocking because noticing is what I do, and my impression was that fruit stickers were rubbish and not worth looking at. So I got a little notebook, that resides in the kitchen "junk"… Read More

Halifax is not great at mourning old buildings that are knocked down, and is particularly unprepared to acknowledge the destruction of interesting structures that are not particularly ancient (i.e. younger than I am). Christian Science Reading Room Recently I received this tweet about the demolition of the Christian Science Reading Room and the attached First… Read More

We visited Greece for the first time in April and it was good. The trip started and finished in Athens, so here are some images of the city, because, like us, you may only be able to conjure up the Acropolis. Air travel is amazing, but is by no means painless. The big new windows… Read More