The wind’s whipping pedestrians into shape, insisting they play its game of Dodge the Debris. Another kind of detritus tells a story of the city. Susan McClure, HRM archivist since 2005, calls it “the byproduct of people’s activity.”
For Dawn Sloane, some of those byproducts could end up in a Halifax history museum. “What we have is parts of Halifax in history museums,” says the councillor for Halifax Downtown, at a coffee shop near the Spring Garden Memorial Public Library.
Sloane believes that building—whose fate is unknown after the new Halifax Central Library is built—could house a municipal museum. History’s built right in—opened in November of 1951, the library was approved by Halifax city council as a commemoration of those lost in the First and Second World Wars. “That’s a war memorial,” says Sloane. “You can’t get rid of a war memorial or turn it into a Gap.”
A Halifax history museum would focus on how the city has shaped itself, instead of focusing on the forces that have shaped it, she says. This could include an awareness and appreciation for Halifax’s civic spirit and its administrative structure—up to and including the creation of HRM.
It could include social and economic histories, such as the destruction of Africville, last week’s official apology and how Scotia Square, she says, “wiped out the poor Irish section of Halifax.”
“Why don’t we talk about the gays in Halifax? We could be talking about all the different gay places.
“We could talk about anything,” continues Sloane. “I want it to be almost a soapbox for us.”
An archive has a different tenor than a museum. The former is the quiet keeper while the latter is the animated interpreter. But, HRM archivist Susan McClure explains, “Archives are there to support museums.”
Mainly this is done through research expertise, perhaps identifying and locating that one record in the vast store—some 50,000 square feet and “bursting at the seams,” says McClure.
The HRM Archives collects records from both municipal (from staff, council and different departments, such as police) and community sources (businesses, community leaders and groups). For example, there’s a series of photographs “taken by city of Halifax building inspectors from the 1950s through to the 1980s,” McClure explains. “They were just out there doing their job of documenting unsightly premises. So we have over 6,000 images that show a lot of Halifax that doesn’t exist anymore.”
What makes an unsightly premises and were these properties always fairly judged? Did these photos tell the whole story or were they used to tell an official one? The archivist, again, doesn’t interpret history, McClure says. She doesn’t have an immediate answer, but she could supply a museum with a selection of those photographs and context for its own inquiry and interpretation.
A small staff (mainly McClure and a librarian) and budget (roughly $150,000) makes ongoing digitization impossible, she says. Yet, the demands and expectations remain high. But the archives’ biggest challenge remains its location in Burnside Industrial Park. “It’s not ideal for public access. But some researchers love coming out here. There’s free parking and the [52] bus does stop at our door [81 Ilsley],” McClure says.
Sloane has pointed this out publicly. McClure’s “not impressed with my comments about how they’re over in a place where no one can access them, which is the truth,” says Sloane. She wants immediacy: “If I was coming off of a cruise ship, and I wanted to see the essence of Halifax, a snapshot of the conception of Halifax itself, to the Explosion, to the Queen coming here with the King and going for a stroll in the Public Gardens—all those things are locked away somewhere. You can see them at a virtual museum at the archives, the Nova Scotia Archives, which pops up something once in a while on Twitter.”
Lauren Oostveen, a project coordinator on contract at Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, started tweeting selections from the provincial archives on her own, between bigger projects, such as the film digitization she’s doing with a Dartmouth documentary filmmaker.
“When I have a couple minutes apart from this film project and a few other things I have going on, I just go online and share some of my favourite photos, or do a this-day-in-history kind of thing,” explains the 24-year-old. It’s her attempt, she says, “to start a dialogue with people who are local, as well anyone else who happens to join in the conversation.”
Her conversational partners include archivists from around the world. Of the 2,208 followers of her NSARM Twitter account, there are people from the US, New Zealand, South Africa and from across Europe. “There’s a really strong archival community online,” says Oostveen. “Tons of genealogists too: so many people have their roots here in Nova Scotia.”
On Facebook, members number 1,180 and most are between the ages of 25 and 44. And of the total membership, 65 percent are women, reports Oostveen.
“I saw there was a natural fit between the online content we had and these different websites,” she says.
Last fall, Dawn Sloane started a group on Facebook (now with 425 members) to advocate for the Halifax history museum. In November, more than 30 people met face-to-face. “We’re very preliminary,” Sloane says of her group. Having a committed core of volunteers is essential, she says. “We have to get people excited about it first.”
Sloane is excited by the museum’s potential for “social interaction”—being around other people. Through changing programming and events, she believes a local history museum will become a gathering point, a popular exchange.
According to Oostveen, physical and digital worlds have to work together. Researchers, buffs and the bored at work have learned that “we exist,” thanks to her social media marketing. There have been numerous occasions when an online discussion has led to a visit to the red-brick archive building at Robie and South. Archives and museums differ this way. “People come in by themselves to an archives,” Oostveen says.
“We’re a product of the people who came before us, and the decisions they made, both on a personal level and the city of Halifax, the province of Nova Scotia.” People are, of course, free to agree to disagree with the decisions, she continues. “What would be cool is if people took more ownership of local history.”
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This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2010.
Well gee Dawn look here: http://www.dartmouthheritagemuseum.ns.ca/d…
An existing cultural history museum that’s been left without a home for close to a decade. Is the city going to do anything with this, or what?
Typically I think Ms. Sloane is a little out there but this is almost a perfect idea, “…history is built right in…” certainly rings true. Upgrade the building’s infrastructure and turn it into a museum. Any future developments on that site would of course have to address/work around the mass grave in the front yard…left over from the Poor House which previously to occupied the site.
I rarely ever support anything that Sloane spews out, but this is actually a good idea. The location and history of the library is far too significant to just let it go away. A museum would be a great idea, supporting the history that Halifax clearly has, and finally giving us a proper and accessible place for it.
As great as the Dartmouth Heritage Museum is, Halifax isn’t Dartmouth. There’s no reason we can’t have both, and I think it goes without saying that Halifax is an inappropriate location for a Dartmouth-based collection.
I think that would be shortsighted, alam. See, eventually, after the novelty wore off, locals would stop going regularly, meaning that tourism would be required to fill the coffers. Combining both would not only make great financial sense, it would fill the greater need, as it chronicles both histories of each city. A tourist shouldn’t have to go to both sides of the harbour, nor should they. History is meant to share and it shouldn’t be exclusive to the residents of the city.
As usual, Sloane is as dumb as a bag of hammers. Museums are always a burden on taxpayers — they never support themselves. HRM is facing a $30 million budget gap this year that will only get worse in future years. The library building’s biggest drawback, according to the library people, is that it cannot serve the public very well without a massive refit for things like air conditioning and all-new infrastructure. How much would that alone cost? Then add onto that the annual operating deficit and you have another HRM money pit.
SGR is a vibrant, COMMERCIAL street — a museum would be a black hole. I will continue to argue that, for that reason, the new mega-library should not go where it is going, but that battle is seemingly lost. So we would have 2 black holes. The war memorial argument is simply stupid — of course you can relocate it or demolish it. It has no official standing.
Consider yourself lucky if you can sell the place for a few dollars. No commercial enterprise would likely want to be there, but maybe I can be proven wrong. It’s a shame it isn’t big enough for a proper performance venue.
I don’t like this idea- and I say this as a heritage worker in HRM. I’ve worked in a lot of museums and heritage institutions here at home in Nova Scotia and abroad. A building being old doesn’t automatically mean it’s a great existing venue for a museum- it seems to me this past summer, the library had to close one day because it was too hot to work in. I wouldn’t want to permanently house and/or display a heritage collection in widely variable conditions like that. The upgrades to these facilities can be prohibitively costly- one org I worked for was half-housed in older facilities, half-housed in newer facilities. The older facility had asbestos flooring and little temperature and humidity control. A museum complex needs to have a controlled environment more than it needs to have an old building “because it’s historic”.
Remember all that talk that the parking lot over the road from American Apparel was meant to be some kind of (performing?) arts facility before we found it it’s the future site of a downtown Chickenburger? This is that I would do with the SGR library building after they build their new facility. What a great intimate performance and studio space it would make.
It seems like a nice idea on some level, but there’s a reason why they are building a new library in a new location. The old building is even less suited to being used as a museum than it was to being a library and there is no money earmarked for renovations or ongoing operation.
Unless the city sells off the building we’ll be stuck with something along the lines of Bloomfield – something that would be nice but in practice is half-empty because there is no money for proper operations.
Another simple reality is that the city can’t keep all of its old buildings indefinitely, unless we want the downtown to be a giant collection of former libraries. Letting the old main library turn into a Gap isn’t actually a big deal – we’re going to have a new public building right across the street which, if it’s properly designed, will be way better than what we had before.
I really wish some people in Halifax would move away from the misguided idea that anything public is inherently good and therefore needs to be kept around forever, regardless of how useful it actually is…
Just to weigh in again, I’m not 100% certain but I believe there is a clause on that patch of land which stipulates that the site must be used for public use stemming back to when they tore down the poor house in the nineteenth century. That’s not to say they couldn’t still tear down the building, but I think there are deeper reasons why it can’t get turned into a GAP.
One place I lived in had a combined library and art gallery. Small town with money and councillors from the private sector who believed in ‘the public good’. Careful with their money and the taxpayers money. We’ll never see that here, too busy messing around with Commonwealth Games, a convention centre etc.
Too bad they couldn’t put the land up for tender and develop it to its full extent, with a stipulation that a certain amount of space would be leased by the city for a museum/art gallery – with retail frontage, perhaps some sort of a public square too… the building that is there now isn’t a very efficient use of space, and it is such a prime piece of real estate.
The building should stand because it is history, not because it is historic. It is also the present. All those hundreds of people who gather in front of the library every warm day aren’t there for the free books or the french fries. They are there because it is the centre of town, a much needed green space amidst so very much concrete, with a beautiful view of the library building, the old courthouse, and the cathedral.
Whatever goes there, it should be the same building, the same pigeon-laden Churchill statue and the same lovely spot to gather. A public use. There are oodles and oodles of other spots on the peninsula crying out for development.
A museum or municipal gallery or performance or screening venue, Haligonians need them all.
Knock it down !
Rebuild a 3 or 4 storey low rent apartment building in the same foot print as the existing building. That way you have your ‘greenspace’. You have that extremly ugly statue striding in the same place & you give those panhandling the streets around there a home close by ~;)
I’m a huge fan of the museum idea!
I dunno. I think we could really use a Gap downtown. It would go well with the Starbucks and American Apparel and the Lulu Lemon.