ACROSS THE With the Cogswell interchange redevelopment, Halifax has the opportunity to literally and figuratively transform the city.
BY ALEC BRUCE
42
UNRAVEL
JULY / AUGUST 2022
Bruce Murray/VisionFire
I
t does not help Waye Mason sleep at night knowing that Halifax’s biggest public works project in recent times — involving some of the most exquisitely complicated engineering and public consultation the capital has ever witnessed — could be delayed by someone’s ill-timed trip to the toilet. “Those damned blue ceramic pipes,” says the councillor for Halifax South Downtown, one of HRM Council’s advocates of the $123-million Cogswell interchange redevelopment. “They’re, like, 175-year-old sewers you have to get a robot to crawl up and down to make sure nobody’s still discharging into them before you start tearing them out. It’s such a pain in the ass.” Not that he or any number of city councillors, planners, and community leaders are getting much sleep since the four-year project to remove the pedestrian-frustrating, brutalist blob (and replace it with parks, housing, bike lanes, and trails) officially broke ground in November. The long-awaited, muchdiscussed, intensively debated endeavour now loftily and literally promises to reinvent the way people think about the downtown and each other. Or, perhaps more precisely, restore the better angels of their civic characters. “It’s going to be transformational,” says Mason. The project aims to reunify the connections Halifax had before the interchange opened in 1972. “My mom used to shop on Gottingen Street, where there were great dress shops, and you could easily walk from there to Barrington Street,” says project manager Donna Davis. “We’re going to put that brick street system back in place; you’re going to be able to do that again.”
