Obladee Wine Bar—on the corner of Barrington Street and Sackville Street—is barely visible through the jungle of scaffolding. If potential patrons are making a decision based on curb appeal, they would most likely veer away from it, if they noticed it at all.
The scaffolding has been in place since July 2023 when HRM issued an order to immediately fix the building’s facade as it constituted a hazard to the public. Fast-forward 21 months and Heather and Christian Rankin—the brother and sister team who own Obladee— have still not been given a start or finish date for the work.
“It was Canada Day weekend, we were putting the patio out and I went home and got a call from staff who told me that it was reported that a piece of material had fallen off the building.” says Christian Rankin in a phone interview with The Coast. “HRM came down and closed off the sidewalks and when business reopened a couple of days later, HRM produced this order that said that the property owner [not the Rankins] needed to make safe the facade of the building and while they were doing that, they had to erect the scaffolding around the building to protect pedestrians.”
The building owner was told by HRM that the work should be done immediately. According to Rankin, it is HRM’s responsibility to either make sure that happens—by enforcing fines, for example—and if it isn’t happening, to do the work themselves to protect the safety of the public. But so far, nothing has been done at all and, reportedly, the building owner has filed for bankruptcy protection.
“It has been 21 months and to the best of our knowledge, no work has been done against the order,” says Rankin. “We have no start date for the work, we have no end date for the work and we’re out of time.”
Rankin has put in a Freedom of Information request to HRM to find out why the work hasn’t been done yet.
In the meantime, in the low margin restaurant business, Obladee has lost two patio seasons worth of revenue and it’s looking at losing a third if this is not resolved in the next couple of months. “We are losing business every single day. If you look at social media comments, people think we’re closed; you can’t even tell that there is a business operating right now. It’s not viable going forward unless we fix this,” says Rankin.
The Rankins are now calling for a firm public commitment from HRM that the facade will be fixed and the scaffolding removed no later than June 21, 2025. They are hoping that support and engagement from the community will help put pressure on HRM to meet this deadline.
“The key here is that this is unnecessary because this isn’t even a big construction job,” says Rankin. “I had a company come down and look at this and they told me it’s a four-week job for a team of four people working on it. So we’ve given HRM 12 weeks to do a four-week job. It’s just unacceptable.”
The Rankins have explained repeatedly to HRM that the scaffolding is destroying their business and, as far as they’re concerned, they have done everything they can to urge HRM to enforce its order so that it can be safely removed.
The Coast reached out to HRM to find out why the work had not yet started and whether they would commit to meeting the June 21, 2025 deadline proposed by Obladee to complete it and remove the scaffolding. At the time of publication, no response was received.
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2025.
