Halifax’s Historic Properties are situated next to the waterfront just north of where Upper Water meets Duke Street. The series of old stone and wooden buildings were largely constructed in the nineteenth century. Now occupied by boutiques,…

As part of Halifax’s urban renewal in the 1960s, the City of Halifax planned to build an expressway in the central business district. Following the Second World War, families began moving to the suburbs, which was considered a more desirable place…

Scotia Square and Duke Tower are landmarks in Halifax’s downtown. The area they occupy originally contained many streets: Buckingham, Starr, Hurd, Jacob, Poplar, and Hare Lane plus the tail ends of Market, Grafton, and Argyle Streets. As Halifax…

In 1901, Sydney was a town in the midst of a remarkable transformation. Just a decade earlier, it had been what one historian has generously called a "sleepy colonial town." At the end of the 18th century, though, the coming of the steel…

Melville Island, as its name suggests, was once an island. Today, it’s a small peninsula that juts into the Northwest Arm, and home to the ArmdaleYacht Club. Its story – and that of the small peninsula to the east, known as Deadman's Island –is part…

If you turn west at the main entrance to Dalhousie's Studley Campus, the Henry Hicks Building rises up at the end of University Avenue, its tower something of an imposing structure that looms over the campus. This building, when it opened in 1951,…

On the northern boundary of Sydney, adjacent to the steel plant property, is Whitney Pier, a community that has traditionally been home to plant workers. Whitney Pier is known for being a remarkably diverse community, the product of an early-20th…

Just off Route 239, overlooking the south arm of Sydney Harbour, you can pull off the road and enjoy and picnic and a hike in Petersfield Provincial Park. The park gets its name from the Petersfield estate, the grand home built by industrialist and…

In 1885, Margaret Florence Newcombe became the first woman BA to graduate from Dalhousie. In the years and decades that followed, a number of pioneering women followed in her footsteps, and slowly but surely the number of female Dalhousie students…

In the early 1800s, George Ramsay, the ninth Earl of Dalhousie and Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia, had a vision: that Halifax would be home to a non-denominational college, where lectures were available to all regardless of religion or…