Steven Laffoley - Mean Streets: In Search of Forgotten Halifax, 1953-1967

Copyright 2020 Steven Laffoley

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Mean streets : in search of forgotten Halifax, 1953-1967 / Steven Laffoley.

Names: Laffoley, Steven Edwin, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200172832 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200172867 | ISBN 9781989725115 (softcover) | ISBN 9781989725122 (HTML)

Subjects: LCSH: CommunitiesNova ScotiaHalifaxHistory20th century. | LCSH: Urban renewalNova ScotiaHalifaxHistory20th century. | LCSH: Halifax (N.S.)History20th century.

Classification: LCC FC2346.4 L37 2020 | DDC 971.6/225dc23

Cover image: HRM Archives, City of Halifax Engineering and Works Department photograph 102-39-1-716-12

Cover design: Gail LeBlanc

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Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

George Eliot

This book is dedicated to the City of Halifax,
my muse for many books now.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man

Raymond Chandler

A Halifax City Engineering and Works inspector studies a condemned building on Gottingen Street, 1961.

I n the late 1950s, after much study, discussion, and debate, a small group of politicians and city planners made a momentous decision they decided they would sweep away whole neighbourhoods of Halifax, neighbourhoods that had stood witness to two hundred years of history.

All gone.

Forever.

Why? Well, these self-appointed prophets of mid-century modernity and proselytizers for mass city development believed that if they swept away the citys mean streets those dark and dangerous places where disease and crime purportedly ran rampant they could create a better future for all, one with gleaming shopping malls, high-rise apartment buildings, and elevated highways.

They even had a name for it.

Urban renewal.

With the best of intentions, they bulldozed the past and built brash new monuments to a modern Halifax, monuments that included Scotia Square, Mulgrave Park, the Cogswell Interchange, and Uniacke Square. And the citizens of the city applauded the effort.

Well, at least those who could afford to applauded it.

For those who actually lived in the neighbourhoods deemed dark and dangerous, the response to urban renewal was notably different. These people were more often than not Halifaxs most vulnerable citizens, the poor and people of colour, who had little power to make decisions about the conditions of their own lives or determinations about the direction of their own fates. During the long decade before the first bulldozers of urban renewal rolled, no one from city hall honestly or earnestly listened to what these people wanted for their own lives and for their own neighbourhoods. The folks from city hall were too busy making tangible plans to erase the mean streets.

They even had a name for it.

Slum clearance.

And so it was.

The patrician politicians and dull city planners simply swept away hundreds of houses and buildings and dozens of streets, and in doing so, swept away the thousands of interrelated lives and individual experiences.

All gone.

Forever.

Now, more than half a century has passed. Fewer and fewer people can recall with any immediate, visceral clarity what life was like on those mean streets of Halifax in the 1950s and 1960s, their collective memory slowly vanishing by degrees, first into nostalgia and then into nothingness.

Or so it seemed.

While researching Halifax Nocturne, a novel set during the building of the Macdonald Bridge, I came across a curious cache of old photographs, more than a thousand of them in fact, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s. They were taken by a small band of building inspectors from the Halifax City Engineering and Works Department almost certainly all men in an age of clearly defined gender divides each carrying a city-issued press camera and a handheld flashbulb unit, with the task of photographing unsightly premises, fire and flood damage, and construction. In doing so, they created a fascinating collection of pictures.

A city archivist later described the collection this way: Most of the images depict houses, buildings, and properties but street-scapes, excavation and building sites, and aerial views are also found throughout the series. As well as documenting buildings and sites, the photographs often show neighbourhood life (cars, pets, children, laundry, billboards, etc.).

Certainly, the collection was memorable, but in an unusual way.

After all, these city building inspectors were not professional photographers, and the images they produced were hardly the stuff of art. These fellows paid little, if any, attention to the texture, symmetry, depth of field, contrast, foreground and background, or visual storytelling of their pictures. Rather they were just snapping shots of derelict places for use by the city and then heading home for dinner.

And yet, by splendid happenstance, all in the course of just doing their jobs, these city inspectors documented a timeframe tapestry of sorts, one that captured the lives of people living in those so-called mean streets, those dark and dangerous places, where they worked and they lived, captured the real moments of life in these neighbourhoods, almost capturing them in amber or silver nitrate, as it were.

Consider the following picture.

This photograph was taken between 1957 and 1962, some six decades ago now. It is typical of the pictures taken by the inspectors.

What is the subject?

For me, my eyes are drawn to the boy in the lower corner. Maybe three years old at the time, he stands stoically on a thick tussock in a backyard, his hands folded neatly at the waist. He wears a white T-shirt, stained with food or drink, and a pair of blue jeans with one cuff rolled up. His shoes have disappeared into the grass.