Halifax is the capital of Nova Scotia and is one of Canada’s fastest growing municipalities. It currently has a population of just less than 450,000 and is a rather quiet place in the winter. There’s a lot of things that don’t open/operate in the winter at all, and also many things in the city are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Thankfully I had some decent weather during my days here, so being outside and walking around was quite doable. Rather than my posts being chronological in terms of my trip, because I’m doing them all after I’ve returned home, I’m going to group them a bit more by ‘theme’ - so this post is primarily things I did in downtown Halifax. Other posts will highlight the harbourfront area, as well as some time I spent in Dartmouth.
I stayed at a lovely hotel and was spoiled with an end room that had windows facing the harbour in two different directions.
Here’s what my hotel windows looked out onto.
The Dominion Public Building is an Art Deco-style office building. Completed in 1936, and although since surpassed, it was the tallest building in Halifax at the time. The building is a federally recognized heritage building.
Province House in Halifax is where the Nova Scotia legislative assembly has met every year since 1819, making it the longest serving legislative building in Canada and it is Canada’s oldest house of government. 2008 marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of parliamentary democracy (i.e. representative government) in Canada, which started in Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia Reception Room, in Province House
Veterans Room
The Legislative Chamber where the House of Assembly meets.
The Legislative Library was originally the home of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia until the court outgrew the space. This Supreme Court chamber was the site of Joseph Howe’s (nope, no relation) 1835 trial for seditious libel. Newspaper editor Joseph Howe defended himself at trial and his success in this case is considered a landmark event in the evolution of press freedom in Canada.
The Red Chamber was formerly the meeting place of the Nova Scotia Council and later the Legislative Council, the upper house of Nova Scotia’s legislature. Now the room is used for receptions and other meetings.
The Grand Staircase
Joseph Howe (1804-1873) was a Nova Scotian journalist, politician, public servant, and poet. Howe is often ranked as one of Nova Scotia’s most admired politicians and his considerable skills as a journalist and writer have made him a provincial legend. In 1835, Howe was charged with seditious libel, a serious criminal offence, after the Novascotian (the newspaper Howe owed) published a letter attacking the Halifax politicians and police for pocketing public money. Howe addressed the jury for more than six hours, citing example after example of civic corruption. The judge called for Howe’s conviction, but swayed by his passionate address, jurors acquitted him in what is considered a landmark case in the struggle for a free press in Canada.
The next year, Howe was elected to the assembly, beginning a long and eventful public career. He was instrumental in helping Nova Scotia become the first British colony to win responsible government in 1848. He served as premier of Nova Scotia from 1860 to 1863 and lead the unsuccessful fight against Canadian Confederation from 1866 to 1868. Having failed to persuade the British to repeal Confederation, Howe joined the federal cabinet of John A. Macdonald in 1869 and played a major role in bringing Manitoba into the union. Howe became the third Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia in 1873 but died after only three weeks in office.
Government House of Nova Scotia is the official residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, as well as that in Halifax of the Canadian monarch. Construction of Government House was ordered in 1800 and is presently the oldest viceregal residence in North America.
St, Paul’s Anglican Church is the oldest building in Halifax and the oldest existing Protestant place of worship in Canada. Founded by proclamation of King George II in 1749, the building was erected in the summer of 1750, and the first service held inside that September.
The casavant organ was installed in 1908
St. Paul’s church and parish hall survived the Halifax Explosion (06 December 1917) without major damage. Immediate aid was available in the parish hall, and an army of parishioners mobilized to assist the victims of the disaster. One reminder of the Explosion in the church is a piece of window frame embedded above the War Memorial Arch in the entrance area.
The Grand Parade has been a gathering place in Halifax since 1749. St. Paul’s Church is at the southern end of the Grand Parade with the cenotaph, built originally to commemorate the soldiers who served in World War I, in the middle.
Halifax City Hall is at the northern end of the Grand Parade. Constructed between 1887 and 1890, it is one of the oldest and largest public buildings in Nova Scotia.
The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia was founded in 1908 to house the 200 works of the Crown of Nova Scotia. During its early history the museum’s collection moved between several different locations, finally moving into the Dominion Building (built in 1867) and then expanding again in 1998.
Part of expansion was to accommodate the home of Maud Lewis into the museum building. Lewis’s house was purchased by the Government of Nova Scotia after her death and in 1996 the museum took possession and moved it to the museum.
The inside of Maud Lewis’s house, whose walls, and door, are adorned with her art.
Maud Lewis (1903-1970) was a folk artist from Nova Scotia. She lived most of her life in poverty in a small house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. She achieved national recognition in 1964/65 for her cheerful paintings of landscapes, animals and flowers, which offer a nostalgic and optimistic vision of her native province. Early paintings from the 1940s are quite rare, and between 1945-1950 people began to stop at her home, which was on Nova Scotia’s main highway and tourist route, buying her paintings for two or three dollars each. Only in the last three or four years of her life did Lewis’ paintings begin to sell for seven to ten dollars. In 2022, one of Maud’s paintings, Black Truck, sold at auction in Toronto for C$350,000!
Another exhibit at the Art Gallery features a series of 22 hooked rugs created by Deanne Fitzpatrick in 2016. Each of these rugs features salt box houses that sit between crashing waves and windy skies, illustrating Fitzpatrick’s relationship with, and ideas about, the notion of home.
St. George’s Round Church is a wooden round church, built between 1800 and 1812. Given its location so close to point zero of the Halifax Explosion, damages were far less extensive than might be expected. I would have loved to have seen inside but unfortunately it wasn’t open.
The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic is located in downtown Halifax and is the oldest and largest maritime museum in Canada with a collection of over 30,000 artifacts including 70 small craft and the CSS Acadia, a 180-foot steam-powered hydrographic survey ship first launched in 1913.
The evolution of destroyers.
On the morning of 06 December 1917, the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc carrying munitions, collided with the Belgian Relief vessel SS Imo. The Mont-Blanc caught fire and exploded, devastating many neighbourhoods in Halifax, with nearly all structures with a kilometre radius obliterated. 1,782 people were killed and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest human-made explosion before the development of nuclear weapons. It released the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT.
This model of Mauritania is actually two ships in one. Mauritania and Lusitania were sister ships built by the Cunard Line. Both launched in 1906 and they were the largest and fastest ships in the world. The success of the two ships inspired Cunard’s rival, the White Star Line, to build Olympic and Titanic.
The Days of Sail exhibit
A permanent exhibit explores the sinking of RMS Titanic with an emphasis on Nova Scotia’s connection to recovering the bodies of the Titanic victims. Three Halifax cemeteries house 150 bodies. The graves range from the Presidential Secretary of the White Star Line to Titanic’s violinist. About a third of the graves bear no names.
Original models and set from Theodore Tugboat
Originally built in 1908, the Medjuck building is now the home of Dalhousie University’s School of Architecture.
The Halifax Central Library opened in 2014. The design, said to resemble a stack of books, has garnered international attention and has received several engineering and architectural awards. It has been ranked among the 10 most beautiful libraries in the world.
St. Mary’s Basilica holds a central position in the history of Roman Catholicism in Nova Scotia. Originally built in 1820 it underwent extensive expansion between 1860 and 1874, and was then named a Basilica in 1950. It is one of the first Roman Catholic cathedrals in Canada and is an imposing example of Gothic Revival architecture.
Halifax Court House - built in 1863
Opened to the public in 1875, the 16 acres large, Halifax Public Gardens were transformed into the urban oasis of today by the amalgamation of two adjoining gardens, a swampy piece of wasteland, and a lovely bequest from an estate.
The Bandstand in the Public Gardens, built in 1887
The Town Clock, also sometimes called the Old Town Clock or Citadel Clock Tower is located at Fort George (Citadel Hill) and was built to resolve tardiness in the garrison. The clock tower is a three-tiered irregular octagon tower built atop a one-storey white clapboard building. The Town Clock began keeping time for the garrison in 1803.
Citadel Hill is a hill that is a National Historic Site in Halifax. Four fortifications have been constructed on Citadel Hill since the city was founded by the English in 1749, and the third fort (built between 1794 and 1800) was officially named Fort George. The first two and fourth (and current) fort, were officially called the Halifax Citadel. Construction for the present citadel began in 1828 however the star-shaped fortress was not completed until 1856. The grounds of the Halifax Citadel are open year round but unfortunately the buildings are all closed and the living-history program tours don’t operate in the winter. That said, it was still a nice place to visit and take in the view.
