This is a story about a size 12 seafoam green evening gown, hanging on a rack, in 1979. And here’s how Marie Rigby, 88, starts the tale: “One day these two fellas come in and they wanted to know if we had any gowns.” Rigby is long retired from women’s clothing, and nearly 30 years […]
longreads
Posted inNews + Opinion
How to build a local food system
Food. It’s one of the first things we think of when we wake up. It’s a basic need that trumps love, career, even sex. Two, three times a day, the belly must be filled. Yet, too often, we shove any old hunk of calories down our throats. We eat cheap. “Only nine percent of our […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Sable Island’s cod killer?
One morning in early April 2003, the villagers of Smith Sound, Newfoundland, awoke to a glimpse of what it might have been like to live there 500 years earlier. The sound was brimming with cod, as far as the eye could see. Villagers rushed out in their boats, scooping the fish up in nets and […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Terminal disease
Brenda Hurlbert left her father’s funeral in New Brunswick with a few of his most prized possessions. Hurlbert sat down at a video lottery terminal on the Digby ferry headed back to her home just outside Yarmouth. It wasn’t long before she’d blown through all of her money—all but a coin collection willed to her […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The convention centre rescue plan
If you doubt these are topsy-turvy times, consider that mayor Peter Kelly is now held up as Halifax’s foremost example of clear thinking. Building a new convention centre in downtown Halifax is a “no-brainer,” Kelly told a daily newspaper last week, and the comment was placed in a headline on the front page and plastered […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Celebrating our story (at last)
Shortly before 10pm on March 31, 2006, residents along the Old Birchtown Road near Shelburne reported seeing what looked like a white Pontiac Sunfire speeding away from the site of the one-storey wooden bungalow that housed the offices of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalist Heritage Society. Within minutes of the car’s disappearance into the night, hot […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Welcome to the New Dartmouth
The gleaming, stainless-steel kitchen at Dartmouth cafe Two If By Sea is a blur of activity, with a half-dozen young, black-clad employees milling about behind a panelled counter. Tattooed arms dole out espressos, dive into glass jars to retrieve gooey cookies and dig through baskets for croissants the size of footballs. Customers wait patiently in […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
May Ocean versus Goliath
A simple car accident has turned into a nine-year court battle between one of Canada’s largest insurance companies and a cash-strapped artist. Economical Mutual says May Ocean’s unorthodox scientific theories about the origin of humans and language prove she is
“delusional.” But Ocean says she’s just trying to get justice.
Posted inNews + Opinion
How the sewage plant broke
[Editor’s note: this story is one of five Coast articles selected as finalists for the 2010 Atlantic Journalism Awards. All five stories are collected here.] Halifax’s new sewage treatment plant was turned on in February 2008, and it seemed to fulfill its promised intentions immediately. All you had to know was that parts of the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Youth crime and you
Think of every high-profile crime involving a young offender in the last three years. The Common table-leg attack, the shooting above the One World Cafe, the Dartmouth stabbing death of cab driver Ken Purcell, the quadruple stabbing outside the Halifax Forum, the north Dartmouth torture and beating of Kathie-Lee Bennet, the fatal stabbing on Gottingen […]
Posted inLifestyle
Underdog
Act 1: A ragtag band of misfits with nothing to lose and everything to gain. When the film The Mighty Ducks came out in 1992, it was a surprise hit. It grossed $50 million in the US and spawned two sequels. The people had spoken. They love underdog stories on ice (and, apparently, Emilio Estevez). […]
Posted inArts + Music
Art meets hockey
It’s the first warm, sunny Saturday in April and already downtown Halifax is filled with foolishly optimistic crowds wearing shorts and flip-flops. At the Nova Scotia Power parking lot or “graffiti pit” over on Morris and Lower Water streets, a group of about 20 young people are preparing for their weekly street-hockey game around a […]