A Tour of a Vanished Neighbourhood in Halifax, Nova Scotia
The Hopkins atlas of Halifax, published in 1878, offers an excellent, street-by-street guide to the Victorian city. Its large-scale maps appeared in a series of 22 plates, and today we'll look at Plate K.
Plate K takes in the southeastern part of the peninsula bounded by Lucknow St. to the west, South St. to the north (if that's not too disorienting), Inglis St. to the south, and the harbour to the east. Pay attention to the shoreline, by the way, as there has been a lot of infilling. Pleasant St. formerly ran along the beach to Point Pleasant, hence the name, but it has since become Barrington St.
I like Plate K for several reasons. The area is familiar to many of us who live, shop, work, and visit here. Nearly 200 cruise ships will dock here before 2023 is over, carrying over 300,000 passengers. (Some of them, discovering the famous Halifax donair, will stagger back aboard blissfully dumfounded). If that sounds like a big number, the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 is also located here. Approximately a million immigrants came to Canada via this port between 1928 and 1971. It’s kind of like Canada’s Ellis Island. But this was all in the future when Hopkins was preparing his map.
Plate K contains several other features of note for modern Haligonians, including two major grocery store locations. In about three weeks, both will be stuffed with eager students and nervous parents, filling cart upon cart with Mr. Noodle (many of them having not yet heard of the donair). We also see the course of the optimistically named Freshwater Brook. Once upon a time it was just that, but the Victorians have since stuffed it in a pipe and we have adulterated it with all manner of, well, best to move on. But the distinct aroma sometimes wafting up from the storm drains at the bottom of Inglis St. is a good indicator of what flows beneath.
If Freshwater Brook has been buried, so has the old beach fronting the harbour. The construction of the rail line through the south of the peninsula saw countless tons of rock blasted out of the way and dumped along the shore. In places, the fill extends nearly 400m (1300’). These industrial age people are serious about their terraforming.
North of the Superstore, today’s Peace and Friendship Park (formerly the contentious Cornwallis Park, home of the recently unwelcome statue of Edward Cornwallis, Halifax’s founder), was the estate of the Tobin family. Stephen Tobin (1836 – 1905) was a merchant, Halifax Mayor, and Liberal Member of Parliament. The Tobin family’s estate took up the whole park, and I bet if we ran a ground-penetrating radar over this area we’d see the foundations of their ruined buildings. Nearby Tobin St. reminds us of this prominent family.
East of the Tobin property was the Royal Engineers Yard. The Westin Hotel stands here now. And south of this was the sprawling gasworks of the Halifax Gas-Light Company, an antecedent of Nova Scotia Power, which in Hopkins’ day pumped gas to subscribers’ homes in the city through a series of underground pipes. We still come across them on occasion on archaeological projects.
(Incidentally, I’ve never seen a good photo of these gasworks and would love to see one if anyone has one).
But what I find especially compelling about Plate K is the area around Gas Ln., Victoria Ln., Albert Ln., and South Hollis St.: a vanished little neighbourhood now covered almost entirely by the footprint of the Barrington St. Superstore and its parking lot.
Cross-referencing Hopkins with McAlpine’s City Directory of Halifax for 1878-79 can be an absorbing task. Let’s knock on a few random doors on South Hollis St.:
Arthur Spike, bookkeeper, lives at #16.
Across the street, at the rear of the house, you’ll find at #15 Margaret Wilson.
Alexander Wilson, fish curer, lives at #2.
At #18 is the peripatetic John Thomas, lamplighter.
Over at #20 lives Ellen O’Hearn, a widow.
John Carroll, a labourer, resides at #4, while at #17, depending on chance, we will meet either James Henderson, another bookkeeper, or his boarder, James Pryor.
Maybe they'll cross our minds the next time we rattle our carts of groceries over their former homes and backyards. I've been parking my car in Ms. Wilson’s parlour for several years now with hardly a thought.
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The map overlays shown here were made with Google Earth Pro. You can do your own sleuthing through historic Halifax with these resources:
Hopkins at Library and Archives Canada:
McAlpine’s Directory of Halifax, 1878:
Our team has been doing significant work with these resources over the past year or so, and we'll soon be announcing some of our preliminary results.
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