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Halifax Destinations

Citadel

The distinctively bright Georgian Clock Tower , a solitary landmark sitting at the top of George Street beside the path up to the Citadel, looks somewhat confused, its dainty balustraded tower set on top of the dreariest of rectangular shacks. Completed in 1803, the tower is a tribute to the architectural tastes of its sponsor, Edward, Duke of Kent and father of Queen Victoria, who was sent here as military commandant in 1794. The Duke insisted on having a clock on each of the tower’s four faces so none of the garrison had an excuse for being late, a preoccupation typical of this unforgiving martinet.

Up above the Clock Tower, the present fortifications of the Citadel National Historic Site (daily: July-Aug 9am-6pm; Sept-June 9am-5pm; $6 June to mid-Sept, $3.75 in shoulder season, otherwise $1.50) were completed in 1856, the fourth in a series dating from Edward Cornwallis’s stockade of 1749. The star-shaped fortress, constructed flush with the crest of the hill to protect it from artillery fire, seems insignificant until you reach the massive double stone and earth walls flanking the deep encircling ditch, a forbidding approach to one of Britain’s most important imperial strongholds. Despite their apparent strength, however, the walls, faced with granite and ironstone, were a source of worry to a succession of British engineers. The sunken design simply didn’t suit the climate - in winter the water in the mortar and earth froze and the spring melt came with regular collapses.

A slender footbridge spans the ditch and leads into the fort, whose expansive parade ground is flanked by stone walls and dominated by the three-storey general barracks , whose long, columned galleries now mostly house offices, though one particular barrack room has been returned to its appearance as of 1869. Here also is an Army Museum (recommended donation $1), which adopts an earthy soldier’s outlook in the labelling of its wide collection of small arms. Ancient and sometimes rare photos track the Canadian army through its various imperial entanglements - from the Boer War onwards - and there’s an interesting section tracing Canadian involvement with the Anglo-French attack on Bolshevik Russia after World War I. The walls themselves contain a string of storehouses stuffed with military bric-a-brac. Here you’ll find a couple of reconstructed powder magazines, the former garrison school room and several exhibits exploring the Citadel’s history, including a small theatre where an hour-long film, The Tides of History , details the development of Halifax. Also of interest is the Communications Exhibit , which explains the niceties of the Admiralty’s signalling system - a complicated affair with, for instance, different flags for different types of ship and whether they had been sighted or had actually arrived.

Free and entertaining half-hour guided tours (May to late Oct) of the Citadel depart from the information office in the barracks building every hour or so. Throughout the summer, bagpipe bands and marching “soldiers” perform on the parade ground in period uniform and one of the cannons is ceremoniously fired every day at noon. If militarism leaves you cold, the Citadel is still worth a visit for the grand view from its ramparts over the city and harbour.

Downtown

If you retrace your steps past the Clock Tower and head down George Street, you’ll hit the tree-lined, elongated square known as the Grand Parade , the social centre of the nineteenth-century town. For the officer corps, this was the place to be seen walking on a Sunday, when, as one obsequious observer wrote, “their society generally [was] sought, frequently courted, and themselves esteemed” - a judgement rather different from that of the radical journalist Joseph Howe, who hated their “habits of idleness, dissipation and expense”. The southern edge of the parade borders the handsome St Paul’s Church (Mon-Fri 9am-4.30pm; free), whose chunky cupola and simple timber frame date from 1750, making it both the oldest building in town and the first Protestant church in Canada. Inside, the church’s simple symmetry - with balcony and sturdy pillars - is engaging, an unpretentious garrison church enlisting God to the British interest; look out, too, for the piece of wood embedded in the plaster above the inner entrance doors, a remnant of the 1917 Halifax Explosion . Following the disaster, the vestry was used as an emergency hospital and the bodies of hundreds of victims were laid in tiers around the walls.

Charles Dickens, visiting in 1842, described the graceful sandstone Province House , a couple of minutes’ walk from Grand Parade down George Street at Hollis (July & Aug Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat & Sun 10am-4pm; Sept-June Mon-Fri 9am-4pm; free), as “a gem of Georgian architecture” whose proceedings were “like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope”. Highlights of the free guided tour include a peek into the old upper chamber, with its ornate plasterwork and matching portraits of Queen Caroline and her father-in-law, George I. She should have been pictured with her husband, George II, of course, rather than her father-in-law, but no one has ever bothered to rectify this costly decorative error. The present legislature meet in the Assembly Room, a cosy chamber that partly resembles a Georgian bedroom rather than Nova Scotia’s seat of government.

Across the road from the Province House, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia , 1741 Hollis St (Tues-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun noon-5pm, plus July-Aug Mon noon-5pm; $5, free on Tues), occupies two adjacent buildings - one a stern Art Deco structure, the other an embellished Victorian edifice that has previously served as a courthouse, police headquarters and post office. The gallery is attractively laid out and although there is some rotation of the exhibits most of the pieces described here should be on view. Pick up a free gallery plan at the entrance in the more southerly of the two buildings, Gallery South. The Courtyard Level - the ground floor - contains a delightful section devoted to the Nova Scotian artist Maud Lewis (1903-70). The daughter of a Yarmouth harness maker, Lewis overcame several disabilities, including rheumatoid arthritis, to become a painter of some regional renown, creating naive, brightly coloured works of local scenes. Lewis’s tiny cabin - awash with her bright paintwork - has been moved here intact from the outskirts of Digby.

In Gallery North, the two lower levels - the Lower Lobby and Level 1 - hold temporary exhibitions of modern sculpture and painting and a small but enjoyable selection of the work of modern Canadians drawn from the permanent collection: the egg tempera on masonite Island in the Ice by the Nova Scotian artist Tom Forrestall is perhaps the most striking painting here (in Gallery 7), its sharp, deep-hued colours and threatening ice- and seascape enhanced by a tight control of space. Level 2 features local folk art, largely naive and boldly painted woodcarvings and panel paintings comparable to the work of Maud Lewis, as well as a small sample of Inuit work. On Level 3, there’s an excellent collection of Canadian Art , whose earlier canvases are distinguished by four intriguing views of Halifax in the 1760s produced by Dominique Serres in the minutely observed Dutch land- and seascape tradition (Gallery 15). Surprisingly, Serres never actually visited Canada, but painted Halifax while in Europe, from drawings produced by a camera obscura. In the same gallery, there’s Joshua Reynolds’ flattering Portrait of George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax . As the man responsible for colonial trade, Dunk permitted his recently acquired title to be used in the naming of “Halifax” - what would have happened but for his timely ennoblement (Dunk Town?) is anyone’s guess. On the same floor, Gallery 19 holds several canvases by Cornelius Krieghoff and outstanding contributions by members of the Group of Seven . In particular, look out for Lawren Harris’s haunting Algoma landscape and A.Y. Jackson’s dinky Houses of Prospect , typical of Jackson’s later (post-Group) style of softly coloured landscapes. Next door, Gallery 20 is devoted to modern Atlantic Canadian painters. Forrestall makes another appearance here, but it’s his mentor, Alex Colville , who takes pride of place, with several characteristically disconcerting works, a sort of Magic Realism of passive, precisely juxtaposed figures caught, cinema-like, in mid-shot. Finally, on Level 4 (Room 28), there’s a tiny selection of British and European paintings, and - a real surprise - an assortment of ribald Hogarth engravings.

Old Burying Ground and the Nova Scotia Museum

Mysterious and spooky at dawn and dusk, the Old Burying Ground , five-minutes’ walk south of Grand Parade at Barrington Street and Spring Garden Road, looks something like the opening shot of David Lean’s Great Expectations - though the over-blown memorial by the gates in honour of a brace of Canadian officers killed in the Crimean War does somewhat undermine the effect. Many of the tombstones are badly weathered, but enough inscriptions survive to give an insight into the lives (and early deaths) of the colonists and their offspring. The oldest tomb is that of a certain John Connor, who ran the first ferry service over to Dartmouth and died in 1754.

Walking west up Spring Garden Road from the Burying Ground, it’s about 800m to South Park Street, where a set of handsome iron gates serve as the main entrance into the city’s Public Gardens (dawn-dusk; free). First planted in the 1870s, the gardens cover sixteen acres of meticulously maintained exotic shrubs, flower beds and trees set around ornamental statues, water fountains, ponds and a brightly painted bandstand. All together, the gardens are a pleasant interlude on the way to the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History , in the rear of the old grassy commonland at the back of the Citadel, at 1747 Summer St (June to mid-Oct Mon-Sat 9.30am-5.30pm, Wed open till 8pm, Sun 1-5.30pm; mid-Oct to May Tues-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Wed till 8pm, Sun 1-5pm; $3). The best of the museum’s wide-ranging exhibits are those depicting the region’s marine and land-based wildlife, and there’s a modest archeological section too.

Outer Fortifications

In the eighteenth century the British navy protected the seven-kilometre-long sea passage into Halifax harbour , and the Bedford Basin behind it, with coastal batteries strung along the shore between the city and the Atlantic. Two of these are worth a visit, though more for their commanding views than the ragbag of military remains. There’s one at Point Pleasant, at the tip of the Halifax peninsula about 3km south of the city, whilst the other is on McNab’s Island, sitting in the middle of the main seaway, 4km south of the city.

At the end of South Park Street and its continuation, Young Avenue, Point Pleasant Park (bus #9 from Barrington St) incorporates the remains of four gun batteries and the squat Prince of Wales Martello Tower (July-Aug daily 10am-6pm; free), which was built at the end of the eighteenth century as a combined barracks, battery and storehouse. One of the first of its type, the design was copied from a Corsican tower (at Martello Point) which had proved particularly troublesome to the British. The self-contained, semi-self-sufficient defensive fortification with its thick walls and protected entrance proved so successful that Martello towers were built throughout the empire, only becoming obsolete in the 1870s with advances in artillery technology. The surrounding park, 200 acres of wooded hills and shoreline, is crisscrossed by paths and trails and remains one of the few places in North America where heather grows, supposedly originating from seeds shaken from the bedding of Scots regiments stationed here.

McNab’s Island , 5km long and 2km wide, contains the remnants of five different fortifications, dating from the middle of the eighteenth century to the establishment of Fort McNab in 1890. The island, half of which is parkland, is laced with hiking trails and dotted with picnic spots, making it a relaxing retreat from the city. The island is accessible by ferry from the Eastern Passage jetty on the east (Dartmouth) side of Halifax harbour - call 465-4563 or 1-800/326-4563 for schedule; the round trip costs $8. To reach Eastern Passage jetty from downtown Halifax, take the Dartmouth ferry and then bus #60 (every 30min, hourly on the weekend) from outside the terminal building. Ask the driver to let you off or else you’re likely to go whistling past.

Water Front

One block south of the east end of George Street stands the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic , 1675 Lower Water St (May-Oct Mon & Wed-Sat 9.30am-5.30pm, Tues 9.30am-8pm, Sun 11am-5.30pm; Nov-April Tues 9.30am-8pm, Wed-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; $6), which houses a fascinating exhibition covering all aspects of Nova Scotian seafaring from colonial times to the present day. By the entrance, there’s a reconstruction of a nineteenth-century chandlery, stocked with everything from chains, ropes, couplings and barrels of tar through to ships’ biscuits and bully beef. Other displays include a collection of small boats and cutaway scale models illustrating the changing technology of shipbuilding, a feature on the history of the schooner Bluenose and a number of gaudy ships’ figureheads: look out for the turbaned Turk once attached to the British barque Saladin . In 1844, the Saladin ‘s crew mutinied in mid-Atlantic, killed the captain and ran the boat aground near Halifax, where they were subsequently tried and hanged. There’s also a feature on the Halifax Explosion, illustrated by a first-rate video, One Moment in Time , and don’t miss the section on the Titanic , which sank east of Halifax in 1912. Several pieces of fancy woodwork found floating in the ocean after the sinking have ended up in the museum, a pathetic epitaph to the liner’s grand Edwardian fittings. Docked outside the museum are an early twentieth-century steamship, the CSS Acadia , and a World War II corvette, HMCS Sackville . The first is part of the museum, the second is a (free) attraction in its own right; both can only be boarded in the summer.

The much-vaunted Historic Properties comprise an area of refurbished wharves, warehouses and merchants’ quarters situated below Upper Water Street, 400m north of the Maritime Museum - and just beyond the Dartmouth and Woodside ferry terminal. The ensemble has a certain urbane charm - all bars, boutiques and bistros - and the narrow lanes and alleys still maintain the shape of the waterfront during the days of sail, but there’s not much to see unless the schooner Bluenose II is moored here, as it often is during the summer. The original Bluenose , whose picture is on the 10¢ coin, was famed throughout Canada as the fastest vessel of its kind in the 1920s, although she ended her days ingloriously as a freighter, foundering off Haiti in 1946. The replica has spent several years as a floating standard-bearer, representing Nova Scotia at events such as the Montréal Expo, but it’s now on its last sea legs and its future is uncertain. Pressure groups are campaigning to have it berthed permanently here at Halifax or at its home port of Lunenburg.

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