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  #381  
Old Posted Apr 2, 2017, 5:11 AM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
Another Pentagon Building photo was added to the archives:




The Pentagon Building, 1 Buckingham St., prior to demolition by Halifax Municipal Archives, on Flickr

Last edited by OldDartmouthMark; Apr 12, 2018 at 10:19 PM. Reason: Deleted bad photo links - main photos posted below
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  #382  
Old Posted Apr 2, 2017, 5:55 AM
fenwick16 fenwick16 is offline
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^^^ What I find interesting in the second picture is that it appears to be the same cars in the sames spots as the first picture. So it seems that the pictures were taken on the same day and probably within a few minutes of each other.

The windows on the Pentagon BLDG were boarded up, so the pictures were probably taken with the knowledge that the building would soon be demolished.
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  #383  
Old Posted Apr 2, 2017, 1:05 PM
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If you think Lower Water St where is passes the Morse's Tea bldg is ridiculously bottlenecked, look at the ROW width of the street to the right of the Pentagon in the second pic. Maybe a single lane. Even a horse and buggy would be challenged. I can see why it needed to go.
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  #384  
Old Posted Apr 2, 2017, 2:43 PM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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True enough, but I can't help but think if they had planned things more carefully with an eye on maintaining a good mix of interesting/significant older buildings combined with new development, they could have made it work without the 'blast it all out and build fresh' mentality.

For example, the tight spot referred to was also affected by the location of the Ordnance Yard, shown in the 1878 map below. The boundary wall is seen in the background of the upper photo and to the right of the lower photo. That whole area was demolished during the urban renewal project, so the traffic flow could have been improved while keeping the Pentagon Building and widening the street on the Ordnance Yard side.



https://novascotia.ca/archives/maps/archives.asp?ID=33

The area can also be seen in the diagram below:


http://www.halifax.ca/property/CogswellHistory.php

Other than the truck traffic from the container terminal, the overall traffic situation in the downtown really isn't all that bad and could definitely be improved with a good transit system. When this is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that the whole Harbour Drive proposal was not a good solution for Halifax, and should never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Some clear thinking, rather than simply following the planning trends that were popular in other cities at the time, could have given us a downtown area which would have been much better than what we have been left with.

Hopefully, with the chance to start from a clean slate again through the removal of Cogswell, our city planners and politicians will put more thought into it than they did the last time... I'm a little nervous that they will screw it up again, though, in seeing the above proposal.
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  #385  
Old Posted Apr 2, 2017, 2:46 PM
fenwick16 fenwick16 is offline
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Originally Posted by Keith P. View Post
If you think Lower Water St where is passes the Morse's Tea bldg is ridiculously bottlenecked, look at the ROW width of the street to the right of the Pentagon in the second pic. Maybe a single lane. Even a horse and buggy would be challenged. I can see why it needed to go.
I have noticed this also, however the buildings to the harbour-side (i.e. Ordinance Yard) of Upper Water Street were all torn down, so it would have been possible to widen the street on the east side. I have posted a picture below of the bottleneck that you referred to. And here is a link to a 1878 map of that area in which the Pentagon Bldg is labeled as the "Jas F. Avery" building - https://novascotia.ca/archives/maps/plate.asp?ID=4 .

In my opinion, the biggest mistake was in creating the Scotia Square superblock, and building the Cogswell Interchange; Halifax would be a better city if Buckingham Street still existed and Scotia Square were split into at least 2 or 4 smaller blocks. But again, it is past history and it can't be realistically undone.

I don't really intend this as an argument to your claim because it is past history, however I think it would be interesting to recreate the Pentagon Bldg as part of the International Place but slightly to the Scotia Square side (west) of where it was.

(source: https://novascotia.ca/archives/Built...ves.asp?ID=131 )


PS: I noticed after posting this that OldDartmouthMark posted similar thoughts in his post above, but I will keep my post here anyways
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  #386  
Old Posted Apr 3, 2017, 1:46 PM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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It's interesting that we had similar thought processes here. Thanks for keeping your post as you add other insights plus a photo that clearly illustrates the situation.
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  #387  
Old Posted Apr 3, 2017, 6:35 PM
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Originally Posted by fenwick16 View Post
Nice find someone123; it is interesting that there was an actual sign calling it the "PENTAGON BLDG".

I think a developer could have some latitude to recreate it in a slightly different location (to fit the International Place plans) and perhaps allow them to increase the floor heights, if necessary.
1. you really see why it was called the pentagon building - that really is an odd shape.

2. International place is basically dead i figure. the original proposal was was constrained by Harbour drive, which will cease to exist, allowing for squaring of the lot.
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  #388  
Old Posted Apr 3, 2017, 9:21 PM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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There are some additional photos of the Pentagon Building from 1962 on the Municipal Archives site. I'll post them all together including the pics that were previously posted so they are all in one spot:





















Source

Suffice it to say that I think this would have been a really cool building to have been saved...
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  #389  
Old Posted Apr 4, 2017, 1:20 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P. View Post
If you think Lower Water St where is passes the Morse's Tea bldg is ridiculously bottlenecked, look at the ROW width of the street to the right of the Pentagon in the second pic. Maybe a single lane. Even a horse and buggy would be challenged. I can see why it needed to go.
Going through council minutes, I stumbled on a motion for a report for the advisability of expropriating the Pentagon building - Feb. 13th, 1906

the report came back saying the building was available for purchase for $25,000. expropriation was inadvisable, and the city should try to get a strip of land form the ordinance yard across the street.

Last edited by Ziobrop; Apr 4, 2017 at 1:33 PM.
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  #390  
Old Posted Apr 4, 2017, 1:37 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ziobrop View Post

2. International place is basically dead i figure. the original proposal was was constrained by Harbour drive, which will cease to exist, allowing for squaring of the lot.
Yeah, how long has International Place been a hypothetical project? Decades? Given the current office-vacancy rate and the unlikelihood of new office towers going up any time soon (and the fact that even when the market becomes viable for them again, International Place may not be at the front of the line) I don't think it makes sense to sit on the land.

If some better idea came along I'd be perfectly happy to stick International Place in the pile of "never builts" that any city has. The site could also work for any number of other ideas, whether it's rebuilding the Pentagon Building, or some sort of park/square there as a gateway to the new Cogswell neighbourhood, or simply a residential building.

Actually, now that I think about it, any of those would probably be preferable to an office building.
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  #391  
Old Posted Apr 4, 2017, 2:18 PM
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Originally Posted by Drybrain View Post
Yeah, how long has International Place been a hypothetical project? Decades? Given the current office-vacancy rate and the unlikelihood of new office towers going up any time soon (and the fact that even when the market becomes viable for them again, International Place may not be at the front of the line) I don't think it makes sense to sit on the land.

If some better idea came along I'd be perfectly happy to stick International Place in the pile of "never builts" that any city has. The site could also work for any number of other ideas, whether it's rebuilding the Pentagon Building, or some sort of park/square there as a gateway to the new Cogswell neighbourhood, or simply a residential building.
ECL owns the land, so that would be their choice. One reason that they may be sitting on the land is because they are waiting for the final Cogswell Interchange plans; it makes sense for them to know the street configuration prior to proceeding with plans.

I think ECL is the best choice for developing this land. Although they are associated with developing Scotia Square (through Halifax Developments), Halifax Developments did listen to residents' concerns regarding tearing down Granville Street properties in the 1970's and incorporated these properties into the Barrington Delta Hotel. I was told, while working at Scotia Square part-time in the early 1970's, that they initially had plans for a 30 storey tower on that Granville Street site.

I think the plan for the International Place was mixed use; so if residential units are more in demand then they can look at apartment/hotel options in addition to commercial. ECL has the financial backing to proceed once the Cogswell Interchange work is complete. It would certainly be a great benefit to the city if they could incorporate a recreation of the Pentagon Building; I think the city could encourage such a recreation by planning the street layout so that ECL has a bit more space on the Hollis Street side to recreate it as close to its previous location as possible. Hopefully the city would consider such an option and speak to ECL in advance.
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  #392  
Old Posted Apr 4, 2017, 2:43 PM
Drybrain Drybrain is offline
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Originally Posted by fenwick16 View Post
I think the plan for the International Place was mixed use; so if residential units are more in demand then they can look at apartment/hotel options in addition to commercial. ECL has the financial backing to proceed once the Cogswell Interchange work is complete. It would certainly be a great benefit to the city if they could incorporate a recreation of the Pentagon Building; I think the city could encourage such a recreation by planning the street layout so that ECL has a bit more space on the Hollis Street side to recreate it as close to its previous location as possible. Hopefully the city would consider such an option and speak to ECL in advance.
That'd be interesting. I think that in order to get things like any kind of historic recreatino, we need a city council that's willing to spearhead some of these ideas and try to direct private developers, rather than just sit and pass judgement on the latters' plans.

The Argyle streetscaping is a good example of a city-directed initiative like that on a fairly small scale. The Cogswell is an area of enormous potential, and it would be a waste to have it go to some RFP and just be developed en masse without some more imaginative thinking going into it.
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  #393  
Old Posted Apr 18, 2017, 11:46 AM
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Here is a website put together by Daniel de Moissac, who is a planning student at Dal.

https://dalspatial.maps.arcgis.com/a...49ed7341373f62

His prof Eric Rapaport shared it, as well as a video attached to his tweet.

https://twitter.com/rapaport1010/sta...81553219104772
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  #394  
Old Posted Apr 18, 2017, 4:38 PM
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Odd that the Buckingham Tavern we were talking about yesterday in another thread seems to have claimed the neon sign from another tavern that was across the street further south on Barrington. I also see the Peppermint Lounge neon sign I mentioned.

I couldn't get the time lapse to display and the 4 points in time imagery near the end of the site did not seem to make much sense as it had two areas to select years but only the top set seemed to do anything.

I found the table with stats on the buildings over time a bit strange. At one point it said the average building size was 130 sq ft. Maybe that included outhouses.
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  #395  
Old Posted Apr 18, 2017, 9:34 PM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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Interesting that many of those photos have been posted here before, including the one at the bottom of old Cogswell/Brunswick that ns_kid shared a while back:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...57#post7029557


Is it possible that the author reads this forum? Regardless, it's an interesting piece of work IMHO.

That pic with the Peppermint Lounge was posted by fenwick16 in the Historic Halifax thread as well:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...=216780&page=2



The image is from 1960.

https://novascotia.ca/archives/NSIS/...es.asp?ID=1750

If you zoom in on the sign:


Looks like it was named the Oasis Tavern (man, lots of Taverns in that neighborhood back then!).

I see a lot of similarities but it's not the same (unless it was reconfigured/rebuilt before it was installed on the Buckingham Tavern).



Looks like it was gone by 1967...


Source - search for "North-west corner [of] Barrington and Duke Streets"

The NS archives also has another view of that strip (1967) which shows the Peppermint Lounge, though it's not all that clear:


A little clearer if you play with the brightness/contrast...


https://novascotia.ca/archives/Built...ves.asp?ID=136

It would make sense that the sign could have been repurposed and moved across the street though, as you can't see the Buckingham Tavern in the 1960 shot, but there's no "smoking gun" pic yet to prove one way or the other...

Probably should have posted all this in the Old Halifax thread, but here it is...
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  #396  
Old Posted Oct 3, 2017, 1:28 AM
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The Cogswell page on the city website now says fall 2018 for the beginning of demolition work.

This feels a bit like "current year +1". I'm pretty sure fall 2017 was given as the date at one point.
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  #397  
Old Posted Oct 4, 2017, 6:05 PM
OldDartmouthMark OldDartmouthMark is offline
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The Cogswell page on the city website now says fall 2018 for the beginning of demolition work.

This feels a bit like "current year +1". I'm pretty sure fall 2017 was given as the date at one point.
Just looked up a couple of old articles and they stated demolition expected to start in fall of 2017, but were worded quite vaguely.
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  #398  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2018, 10:19 PM
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Last edited by OldDartmouthMark; Apr 15, 2018 at 4:03 PM.
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  #399  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2018, 12:01 AM
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Looks okay overall. I think it's a missed opportunity though to put in mere transit lanes and an open-air bus terminal when this large area could be redeveloped into something more. This is an opportunity to build relatively cheap cut-and-cover tunnels for example.

It's too bad the rail line in the North End was partly destroyed too (not sure if that line could ever be reconstructed). It could have easily been extended to Scotia Square, and even linked up with the South End line via a train tunnel running under downtown for only 2 km or so. A loop running around the peninsula and connected to a line running out to Bedford and beyond would be the start of a great rail system.

The area labelled Ordnance Square is currently pretty bad for pedestrians, and the area at the end of Granville Mall is ugly, and everything is cut off from Purdy's. Just developing the little chunk up to Bells Lane will be a nice improvement for downtown. Hopefully that part is front-loaded and happens in a couple of years.
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  #400  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2018, 12:58 AM
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I am not optimistic about this at all. Could be the death knell for the downtown.
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