Hanging on lampposts,the banners depict players in action, like oversized hockey cards. The standards for the 16 teams lead a rush along downtown streets tothe Halifax Metro Centre on Brunswick, where they swarm the building, crashing it like a net. Look up, there’s Cole Harbour’s own Sidney Crosby, Sid the Kid, representing Team Canada in […]
longreads
Posted inArts + Music
Laugh tracking
Picnicface has this thing about “the right laugh.” The eight-member Halifax comedy troupe knows from laughs—-Picnicface has been turning away patrons from its Sunday Night Comedy Spectacular for the past year. That line stretching past the vacant Sam’s building every other Sunday? It’s theirs. Those people scurrying around a packed Ginger’s Tavern as the clock […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Barrington Street fades
It’s the first Wednesday morning in April and a white truck is parked on Barrington. The truck itself is pretty unremarkable—until a couple of men emerge from the storefront it’s parked beside carrying boxes stuffed with plastic shelving units. Then the vehicle’s purpose becomes clear. Just four days before, the retail space the men are […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Barrington: Past and future
The decline ofBarrington Street as the commercial and cultural heart of the city can be traced to the departure of Eaton’s from Barrington for the Halifax Shopping Centre in 1963. That’s when architect David Garrett sees it as having really begun. “It was the harbinger of what would happen in the future—basically a flight of […]
Posted inLifestyle
The Mooseheads’ homegrown hope
Will this be the year the Halifax Mooseheads win it all? There are those who will tell you it’s about damn time. Halifax has had a franchise in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League—one of Canada’s three elite professional-hockey-player factories—since 1994. The team has produced close to two dozen players who’ve played in the NHL, […]
Posted inLifestyle
Commonwealth Games investigation part two: where the money went
A year ago last Saturday, Halifax’s Commonwealth Games bid collapsed in acrimony. Politicians pointed fingers at each other and the public demanded answers. But everyone involved in the bid—provincial, federal and municipal officials, and the executives they placed in charge—kept mum, and refused to say what happened to the $8.5 million in public money that […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Going green?
In a decade when you canbuy free-range eggs, organic hair gel and eco-handbags, the mind begins to turn to “greening” your final, inescapable purchase: your funeral. Each year, traditional funerals result in more metal being put in American soil than was used to make the Golden Gate Bridge and enough concrete to build a two-lane […]
Posted inArts + Music
Garrett Mason detours to the Delta
This is the Delta. Flat, cultivated land crawls by on both sides of the smoothly paved two-lane Highway 61, heading southbound from Memphis, Tennessee, to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Nova Scotian blues artist Garrett Mason points to the endless casino billboards and burger joints going by on the 70-mile drive. This is his first time in America, […]
Posted inLifestyle
Just between us
As hard as she tried not to, her eyes kept darting back to the clock. Her appointment with the campus doctor was scheduled for 3pm. Now it was 3:05. It felt as if she’d been in the waiting room all afternoon. Angela tried to focus on the daytime television that was blaring in the corner, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Adam’s fall
Editor’s note This story was honoured with two journalism awards in 2009: The Canadian Association of Journalists gave a CAJ award for best investigative piece by a community newspaper, and it won a gold Atlantic Journalism Award for enterprise reporting. More importantly, the Halifax-Dartmouth Bridge Commission has decided to install suicide barriers along the entire […]
Posted inLifestyle
Kick at the darkness
When Hillary Nette teaches a yoga class, she is the picture of grounded. She speaks gently as she wanders through the room, making subtle but supportive adjustments to an array of bodies. What’s less obvious is that for many years, Nette, 24, suffered from debilitating depression and anxiety. For almost eight years she was on […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Squeezing squeegeers
Meet Danielle Talbot,comic book stereotype of a squeegee kid. She’s got a black hoodie, a black shirt, dark pants and a dog. Talbot is 21. She left her New Brunswick home in her teens and has cleaned car windshields at intersections in cities across Canada off and on for seven years. She’s been in Halifax […]