If there was to be a rallying call for 2020 (and really, as survey replies told us, it was music that helped many in this tough time) the only song to consider would be “Lion” by Corey Writes. “It’ll ache you/The past is the past, you can’t let it break you,” spits the Halifax MC. […]
Reasons we love the city
Posted inBest of Halifax
We love how Halifax answers the door with a smile
Eric Daponte spent the past eight months on the road in HRM. Four, sometimes five days a week, he’s behind the wheel, bringing a pandemic necessity to people’s doors. “Everyone is really stoked when you show up with beer,” Daponte says. “When people ring their doorbell they’re usually like, ‘Who the hell is this at […]
Posted inBest of Halifax
Our collective art beat
“Art helps us: In connecting with art, we connect with each other, we orient ourselves in time,” says sound artist and Nocturne 2020 curator Lindsay Dobbin. In a year where galleries were closed for months—making it hard to access visual art—Halifax’s creative class did what it does best and kept on connecting, kept helping us […]
Posted inBest of Halifax
Going viral as virus therapy
In a time when, as we heard from readers in the survey, the social part of social media became ever more important, Halifax’s love for TikTok hit the mainstream. Two of the city’s stars on the video-sharing app gave us community contained within a backlit screen. Alicia McCarvell (@aliciamccarvell) might be the biggest local name […]
Posted inBest of Halifax
How to bring the party home
“My wife and I really looked forward to the living room dance parties with the kids,” one reader tells us in our Best Of survey. Yep, when joy felt like a match too wet to spark, getting through lockdown was about the little things—like online parties that helped us follow the prophetic words of Lady […]
Posted inBest of Halifax
Our not-so-secret garden
“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden,” wrote author Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1911. But if you look at the 2020 readers’ survey, you can see a garden—the Halifax Public Gardens—that became our whole world. Here, in the midst of fear and uncertainty, was someplace free, […]
Posted inBest of Halifax
It’s been one for the books
In the Best Of survey we asked, “Before Covid, what did a perfect day in Halifax look like for you?” One reader’s answer? “I’m lying on my back on Citadel Hill with a good book.” This bookworm is not alone. When Mike Hamm first came back to work at The Bookmark, he expected things to […]