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Where have all the cool places gone? No more United Bookstore/Little Mysteries will soon be history/The Bookroom gone but not forgotten/Doulls Bookstore/The Bluenose moving to Bayers Road/Urban Cottage going maybe. What are they being replaced with? Souless corporate buildings… —gimmee the good old days
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2014.
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Halifax lost its Barrington Street soul after the Aliant building went up in ’74 or ’75. The whole street has been a festering shithole for decades and will soon be occupied by overpriced specialty shops and over-the-top apartment rentals – I’d rather the stinking shithole than any more pretenious twattery downtown. Like we don’t have enough of that already on Spring Garden Road.
I gotta disagree with everything!! The place sucks and some old bookstore that looks old isn’t going to fix a fucking thing or attract new people or make any cash flow. It might not be the ideal thing with old NS people liking old shit and the “good ol days” but it’s better than letting the place turn into a ghetto. I just hope that the useless heritege society doesn’t get involved any more than they have. A lot of you might like the old shit and if you do then you’re a god damned hipster and should be calling all this old shit vintage… yea lets go to the vintage book store and get stabbed by one of the wierdos that live down there.. awesome reason to keep it the way it is right there.
Big expensive new building is going to fix everything. Just hang tight.
Obviously you haven’t been around Bayers Road lately. The Bluenose closed down weeks ago. Bubba Ray’s Too is going in the old Red Fox spot. Can’t wait.
Bluenose moving to Bayers Road lasted all of two weeks. It’s been shut down with a note saying “Sorry we are closed today” for the last month and a bit.
How can anyone possibly blame the development that is happening?
Those places closed for a reason. They stay closed for a reason. Now if nothing new goes up, will we be Detroit’s sister city?
And yes, big, expensive buildings do solve a problem. The problem of unused abandoned old buildings that nobody wants.
Soulless corporate buildings? – Nope – boarded up storefronts and street manure. Even the cruise ship passenger (those who aren’t toilet bound with tourist-parvo) are bussed straight to Hysterical Properties or out to P@ggy’s Gut. When the sun goes down, the walking dead come out in search of jager-bombs, rather than brains.
So the choice is big, expensive, new buildings or old, expensive, rat infested, buildings.
“Bubba Ray’s Too is going in the old Red Fox spot”
Please let this be true…
for crying out loud, simple solution. kill all the street people (and dead drunk students) and use them as props in our waterfront pirate wars. burn some ships! lob some cannon balls! winsome wenches, grog, houses of ill repute. let’s put the hell back in Halifax! downtown was so bad that the gentry had to live in Dartmouth.
you shouldn’t be able to walk 100 ft on the harbourwalk without stumbling over a capt jack sparrow lookalike.
not losing o.p., lost, a long time ago.
Probably the same place to which words and punctuation that hitherto substituted for forward-slashes went.
those ‘souless’ corporations are jobs kemo sabe!!! those stupid book stores mainly employed by stoners or feminists or crazy jesus freaks or conspiracy nutjobs!!!!!!!
DOES HALIFAX HAVE A SOUL?
“Where have all the cool places gone?… What are they being replaced with? Soulless corporate buildings.” gimmee the good old days
:Soul (n): animating or essential part” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English Usage)
I found this bitch to be extremely interesting as it presupposes that very old question to wit, “What is the nature of the soul?” So where do we start?
As is usually the case in philosophy, we start by giving counter-examples, by clarifying what a soul in the present context is not. Since most philosophers are atheists or agnostics at best, the initial claim is that the soul is not the animating part of a human being which, for those religiously inclined, refers to that which survives death and goes to heaven, or not. Of course, there were philosophers with a strong belief in religion – one thinks of Aquinas or Augustine for example, but their philosophy was “apologetics,” a theological exercise aimed at proving the existence of God. So what do we mean by a soul in the present context? What do we mean by saying that Halifax has a soul?
Two conditions must be fulfilled in order to make the claim that Halifax has a soul. The first is that Halifax must actually exist. If a bomb dropped on Halifax, wiping it out entirely, to say that Halifax has a soul would be incoherent since there was nothing to which the assertion referred. In other words, the denotative referent would be empty. So Halifax must actually exist in order for one to claim that Halifax has a soul. Is there any other condition?
Yes there is. To make the claim that Halifax has a soul presupposes that someone exists who is making the claim. This is the old subject-object dichotomy in philosophical epistemology. While the objective part of the dichotomy is satisfied by the actual existence of Halifax, the subjective part of the claim requires that someone must, indeed, be making the claim. (The truth of the claim is a further matter.) So we have the two required parts required to make a coherent claim, the existence of that in respect to which the claim is made and the existence of the individual making the claim. So what’s next?
What’s next s the nature of the claim itself. What sort of claim is the claim that Halifax has a soul, that it has an essential or animating part? Clearly, the soul is not a free-standing entity. It’s not something which just happens to be “out there.” It cannot, in other words, be an empirical claim, one which can be verified by observation and measurement. Rather, it is conceptually connected to the mind of one making the claim. For the one making the claim that Halifax has a soul, it is logically entailed that Halifax does, indeed, have a soul.
Does that then mean that the claim that Halifax has a soul is merely a figment of the claimant’s imagination? That it is simply a fictitious chimera? Not at all. All claims other than strictly empirical claims – and this means the vast majority of claims – have this self-validating quality. So what’s next?
What’s next is the fact that the one making the claim that Halifax has a soul does so on the basis of familiarity with Halifax but a familiarity which possesses a certain quality, that of a necessary perspective. But of what does that necessary perspective consist?
The necessary perspective required to make the claim that Halifax has a soul rests upon a perspective of time and place. It is a paradox that many (most?) people who actually live in Halifax do not have this perspective since they are submerged in the dross of the quotidian round of making a living – putting food on the table, a roof over their heads, and so on. As such, they lack the necessary perspective required to make the claim that Halifax has a soul. Indeed, they might find the claim odd, even incoherent. However, it is those whose familiarity with Halifax is based on the passage of time who can make such a claim. Such familiarity based on the passage of time is called “nostalgia.” It is, indeed, the present bitcher’s perspective. Moreover, his nostalgia is disturbed by physical changes in the physical reality of Halifax. Note that four of such changes refer to book stores, This indicates that the bitcher is intelligent, that he is capable of reflective thought. Clearly, he would and in fact does maintain that Halifax has a soul.
There is also the nostalgia based on distance, one possessed by those who no longer live in Halifax, those who have moved away for one reason or another. Take me. While having spent my first 24 years in Halifax, I no longer live there but, understandably, have considerable nostalgia for it. I mean, why do you think I come on this bloody site in the first place? So yes, like the bitcher, I would maintain that Halifax has a soul but my claim is stronger since it is based not only on time but also on distance.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
tl;dr