Halifax is one step closer to a reopened Khyber building

“I think at some point, I thought that I was running a marathon. And then I realized that it was an Ironman,” Emily Davidson,â president of the Turret Arts Space Society says. After almost a decade of working to preserve Halifax’s original Khyber building (the gothic-looking manse at 1588 Barrington Street that’s been closed since 2014—not to be confused with The Khyber Centre For The Arts, an artist-run centre based on 1880 Hollis Street), she says it feels “like the swimming and the biking still have to happen.”

But last week, the federal government has given Davidson and her co-organizers the equivalent of a giant, frosty Gatorade, the electrolytes to keep pushing through the remainder of the race to save this historic property: It was announced on February 28 that the federal government invested $200,000 in funding to the Turret Arts Space Society, to go toward finalizing its plans for redeveloping 1588 Barrington Street into a fully-accessible arts and culture hub.

“This funding has allowed us to create a robust, concrete and exciting plan for our redevelopment,” Davidson says, explaining that original plans centered a lot around the society being able to “position itself as a feasible business, a feasible owner of the space in order to in order to negotiate the sale of the building to the society.” When that happened in 2018, with HRM selling the building to the society for a dollar, it became clear that plans needed to evolve for the next steps: “What this one-plan design and abatement does is allow us to have a really robust plan and kickstart some work on the bricks and mortar side,” she continues. “So we will be gearing up to do first round hazardous materials abatement within the space prior to our main construction, in order to create a site that’s safe to enter for our architect and engineering teams.” (The hazardous materials include asbestos, which is what caused the building to be shuttered in the mid-2010s in the first place. It’s kept a vacant watch over downtown ever since.)

“This allows us to kickstart some work on the bricks and mortar side.”

The bicycle and swimming portions of the funding Ironman, to continue Davidson’s analogy, take the shape of money from the city and maybe even the province. The Turret Arts Space Society has received $250,000.00 from Halifax Regional Municipality for holding costs and hazardous materials abatement. “We would love to see an investment in this phase of the Turret Arts Space redevelopment from the Province,” Davidson later tells me by email.

The namesake turret of The Turret Arts Society. Credit: Jake Ivany

Since Davidson joined efforts to save the building 10 years ago—a space that, at different points in Halifax history served as one of the city’s oldest gay bars and, later, the music venue that launched Joel Plaskett—the city’s venue landscape has, undoubtedly, shifted.

When Davidson last spoke with The Coast (in 2020), she said she was compelled to join the efforts to save the Khyber building because “For me, it was a line in the sand: No, not one more space will close and be removed from the arts community.”

These days, as the city remains embroiled in a venue shortage that Davidson described to The Coast in 2021 “an ongoing crisis, maybe 10 years in the making,” she believes the Turret Arts Society’s vision is as relevant as ever: “I think the Turret Arts Space is necessary to continue to build Halifax’s art community—and to do it in such a way that brings people together and values them,” she says. “What we’re building will be in complement with these other spaces, and will be generating the next generation of artists to show in larger venues and to bring the theater experiences to other venues in the city and to jumpstart these artistic careers of professional artists. And so we actually need an ecosystem of spaces working together that complement overlap and create multiple opportunities for the art scene to grow and prosper.”

Between this funding news for the Turret Arts Society and the city’s recent decision to ditch a proposed 55 percent cut to arts funding (with councillors instead deciding to fund $125,000 in annually recurring grants to the sector); looking at the success of recently opened culture hubs in the city like the 2482 Maynard Project (home to The Blue Building Gallery, Wonder’neath Art Society and Eyelevel Artist Run Centre) and the Light House Arts Centre (a Swiss army knife of a space that hosts live concerts and provides a filming set for This Hour Has 22 Minutes); the optimists in Halifax might just say the tide is turning for the arts—or at least, the city’s cultural sector has been given a floatation device to stave off drowning.

I ask Davidson if this sunny read on things is too much. She pauses. “I think it’s a moment to feel hopeful and to keep up the pressure,” she says. Planning an arts hub that’s physically, culturally and financially accessible—which is the aim of the Turret—” is such a hopeful proposition. And it’s really exciting to see that matched with support for this phase of our project, and to see that hope also reflected in the arts community broadly, in moments like for coming together to not just oppose cuts, but to change the conversation from arts funding cuts at the city to arts funding improvements. I think that there’s just so, so much value in our collective action and and and in a hope for a vibrant artistic future.”