A New City Hall

This confidence and prosperity, symbolized by the Coat of Arms, found solid expression in such new buildings, all in stone, as the Halifax Club on Hollis Street, a Customs House and Post Office (today the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia), and after the great 1859 fire, the rebuilding of business premises on Granville Street. But as Haligonians recognized, especially after they saw Saint John, Montreal and Ottawa all build new city halls during 1870’s, Halifax still had to make do with civic offi ces in the old court house erected in 1810 on the waterfront. Never the ideal, as the years passed the old court house, disparagingly referred to as the “Temple”, became more and more inconvenient, with overcrowding and a roof that continued to leak for years, or as a contemporary so elegantly described it: as “a trifle porous”.

If Halifax citizens were united in the need for a new city hall, they were equally emphatic that it should be sited on the north end of the Grand Parade. But an ongoing dispute with Dalhousie College over ownership of the north end of the Parade seemed beyond resolution. In 1879, a committee appointed to consider questions surrounding the Grand Parade reported that it had been unable to reach an agreement with Dalhousie College, which had demanded that the City, in essence, renounce its whole case for ownership. In reply, the committee submitted that for upwards of sixty years the public had “free use and possession” of the space with free right of way and transit over every part of it as well as having it for:

parade purposes, such as the organization, forming, re-forming and disbanding of processions, and of sleigh rides, for the drilling of militia and volunteers, as well as of the regular troops of the garrison, for public meetings, lectures, addresses, preaching, and public demonstrations.

Dalhousie College on the Grand Parade
Courtesy of Dalhousie University Libraries,
William Inglis Morris Collection

Sir William Young, a former premier and later chief justice, and the late chairman of Dalhousie governors, had worked for years to resolve the dispute between the City and the college. In 1886, he stepped forward with a donation of $20,000 to Dalhousie, but conditional on the City providing an acceptable site for the college to erect a new and larger building. Such a site proved to be five acres on the South Common, at the corner of Morris (University Avenue) and Robie Streets, where Dalhousie constructed a new building, to be named after the Reverend John Forrest, Dalhousie’s president at the time.

The resulting deed stated that the City

“shall have absolute in fee simple the said land [Dalhousie College and the land on which it stood] and in the whole of the Grand Parade (so called) and the same and every part thereof shall thereby be absolutely vested in the City of Halifax”. In his end-of-year Mayor’s Address, James Mackintosh noted the city hall project had “passed from the stage of uncertainty and agitation to that of certainty and action”.

There was a “universal consensus” of the desirability of Halifax, a city of 38,000, having a “respectable building” for its city government. Matters now moved forward with speed. E.H. Keating, as the city engineer, oversaw the process. A native of Halifax, Edward Keating had gone to Dalhousie. He had then worked in several architects’ offices while studying civil engineering. As an engineer, he found ready employment in railway construction, including being in charge of the exploration team surveying the route north of Lake Superior for the Canadian Pacifi c Railway. On his return to Halifax in late 1872, he found that he had been appointed city engineer in absentia. A man of exceptional ability and energy he prepared plans and implemented them for numerous civic projects, using both his engineering and architectural knowledge.

Next: Selecting the Design