This means my 10-15 minute essays on whatever I am thinking about on my commute to work have also returned.

After I bought my bus pass today I waited 10 minutes for the #1 bus. I sweat. A lot. So on a day that is already 24 degrees a bit humid, I decided to bus it downtown, rather than walk. Good news for all, the new hybrid buses are air conditioned!

This seems to me to be the single best piece of news on our city this summer. Very little other positive news has come out of council, and our media and civil society organizations all seem to contribute to the malaise.

Maybe it was the vacation in Italy that did it.

Tuscany is wonderful, the people enjoy life, eat well, the music is good, the quality of life high, the towns and cities are walkable, have good public transit, have great public spaces. There is a Joie de vivre in Florence all the time that I wish we had in Halifax more frequently, if at all.

Glancing over the side of the ferry just now, and more importantly, smelling the harbour, well, I wish Peter Kelly luck on his dip today. Restoring the sewage plant to functioning after years of delay in restarting a brand new system cannot be considered something to celebrate, merely ruefully acknowledge.

This ride is almost at an end, so I will cut myself off.

The next few posts will be explorations of things that have been alternating frustrating and exasperating about Halifax, things that need leadership and change.

I know this is a great city and on the balance great people live here, we just need a few unequivocal, real victories and triumphs to restore our confidence.

Hopefully we can get some leaders in place who realize hundred million dollar white elephants are not the same as real social, political and economic success.

Despite the usual mid-summer media doldrums there was still a lot of coverage of HRM By-Law trying to shut down Caribbean Twist.

The new, black owned, busy and delicious Caribbean Twist restaurant at 3081 Gottingen Street had been told that they had to close because the building was “not zoned for a restaurant.”

This is how it was presented by media but being a nerd, I know there is no specific restaurant zoning, so I started digging.  What is the real technical problem here?  Surely this building has always been commercial?  There is no difference in Commercial zoning, if you have it you can be a restaurant.  What gives?

A few weeks ago I went on Explore HRM, the website that HRM runs that lets you look up property information, such as zoning and property ID numbers.

Carribean Twist is in the old Toulany’s building facing the triangle of parkland in front of the famous  Young Street Hydrostone commercial strip.  This “british high street” was created after the 1917 Halifax Explosion leveled the North End.    This side of the park is zoned C2A, which means light commercial use.  We will get back to that in a bit.

On the other side of the park, on Kaye Street has had a mix of commercial and residential, much of which is being redeveloped right now, including the corner of Kaye and Isleville where the new glittery Starbucks has appeared in the bottom of a condo development.  This side of the trangle is zoned C2, also commercial.

Gottingen Street, between Kaye and Young, the final side of the triangle, has two buildings.  One is clearly residential, on the north side, and to the south, is the old Toulany’s building, looks like what you would expect from a 1920s commercial space.  Door on the corner, big glass windows all along the street, just like a hundred other similar buildings in Nova Scotia.

Thing is, this bit of street is zoned residential, R2, for multiple dwelling units in a small building.

So, I wondered, what the hell?

ACT II – The Twists and Turns of History (or – what was old is new, again).

The building was around 1920, the design indicates it was intended to be a store of some kind, so questions start to occur: was it commercial, if so what type of commercial was it,  and when was it zoned to residential?  What was the intention when it was built?  Well, it looked like this:

Current Caribbean Twist building looking very much like a storefront in 1921 - Gottingen and Russell Streets at Kaye Street, ca 1921 (PANS)

So first I went to the Public Archives.

PANS is great, but hard to navigate if you are not a regular. The card catalog is organized by areas of interest and other intuitive groupings that start to make sense the longer you are there.  For me, I have not been there for 15 years, so I was cursing (quietly) a provincial government that has not yet spent the money to put the damn catalog in a searchable database yet.

With staff help I made it to the microfilm, and did two things.  First I looked up the property on the earliest Insurance Survey I could find.  The 1922-1948 map looks like this:

1948 Insurance Map showing Caribbean Twist site as a restaurant. (PANS)

Yep, that’s right.  1948, and 523 (later renumbered to 905 and later renumbered to 3081 Gottingen) is noted as a “rest.”, which I suspected was short for, you guessed it, restaurant.

But business info is not what I was looking for from the map, all I wanted from the map was the old address, so I could look up the address in the old MacAlpine City Directory.

What is cool about the directory is that it said who or what was at each address, organized by street.  Today this would never get past the Privacy Commissioner but for historical research it sure comes in handy.

So I start with 1920.  Nothing.  1921.  Nothing.   1922 – bingo!  The building was two addresses, the south end where the door is now, and the north end.  In 1922 the north end of the building is listed as a “Grocery.”

Was the south end of the building empty, or was it part of the grocery?  I couldn’t tell, but I suspect that, due to the economic crash in Halifax after World War 1, that it took some time to fill all the commercial spots being built in the North End by the reconstruction efforts.

So, I started looking every 10 years, to see what changed. 1932 – grocery store still there.  By 1942 south end of the building is home to, wait for it, the Rex Café. A restaurant!  I have a sneaking suspicion the Rex was a predecessor to Garden View in Dartmouth, but that is another story.  Grocery store was still there.  By 1952 the whole building appears to be the Orchid’s Grill. In the 1960s the building has become Toulany’s  Grocery.

In 1972, the property, part of Joseph Kaye’s grant of 1866, is sold by the Fineberg family to Hanna (John) Toulany, who owns the property to this day.

ACT III – In Which We Learn About Non-Conforming Use.

I need to talk to someone at HRM about how zoning is designated how it changes, so I called around and emailed some councilors and ended up talking to MacKenzie Stonehocker, a Planner for HRM Community Development.

Ms. Stonehocker was very helpful, but couldn’t get too detailed on the specific property because her whole office was in the middle of moving, so the files in question were in a two cubic foot box, ready for transport.

Despite that, the generalities of the area give us a good picture.  According to Ms. Stonehocker, the land use bylaws for Halifax were finalized in 1978, but were basically re-approval of 1950s zoning.  Probably the building was still zoned commercial, but without the detailed files it is hard to be sure.

In the late 80s or early 90s, the old City of Halifax had a city wide planning process, which said that the city should come up with specific zones and regulations, secondary plans, for the city’s neighbourhoods.

The Peninsula North Secondary Planning Area goes to Young Street, so one side of the triangle (Starbucks) is in it, the other side (Hydrostone) is not.  The planning area was cut into eight small sub areas.  3081 Gottingen is in Peninsula North Area Four, which is from Gottingen to Young to Barrington to North.

Current zoning and land use was approved in 1993, so that is likely when the property became zoned for residential.

Ms Stonehocker said that the process was pretty open, much like HRM by Design, so there would have been ads in the paper and notices sent to residents by Alderman.

What I gathered was that, like today, it would have been incumbent on John Toulany as owner of the property, to go to the meetings or write city staff and try and get or maintain a C2 zoning on the property.

I asked Ms Stonehocker about zoning, specifically how Toulany could operate there if it was residential.  She explained that his business was grandfathered, but that such “non-conforming use” agreements are very very specific, so the only business you are allowed, under the rules, to operate there is a grocery store.

To be a restaurant, the property needs to be zoned commercial, any of C2A C2 or C1 designations would do, or the property can get a very specific “non conforming use” agreement approved by HRM Council, something that is not uncommon.

Finally I asked Ms. Stonehocker if it is possible that someone simply made a mistake, that the property designation was transcribed incorrectly in 1950, or 1976, or 1993, or when HRM migrated from paper maps to computer based GIS systems.  She laughed and said that yes, sometimes mistakes happen, but it probably didn’t happen in this case.

ACT IV – Dénouement

The last Toulany business on this site, Toulany's Lunchbox, a, gasp, restaurant and corner store. (Google Street View)

So, the bottom line is that  it seems that sometime after young John Toulany bought the building in 1972, the City of Halifax rezoned the street, and it was decided that the Gottingen Street side of the triangle would no longer be a commercial one.

It is hard to know if Mr Toulany, who last month was in Lebanon and unavailable, knew about the change in status of his property.

It is hard to imaging a commercial property, that has always been a restaurant or grocery since it was built for those purposes, being rezone to residential.

It is easier to imagine the hard working, self employed Toulany missing the importance of the City of Halifax notices in the paper, and having it slip by without comment.

Maybe we have learned a lesson here.

Maybe zoning and neighbourhood plans need to have borders that end one lot BEFORE a street, rather than in the middle of a street.

It cannot make good sense for the commercial area around that park to exist in three totally separate planning areas.

There is a lot of rapid re-development of that neighbourhood and a lot of excitement around Caribbean Twist.  Hopefully, rather than seeing it as undermining the planning in zone 4, peninsula north, it will be easier for HRM Council to swallow the idea of ‘restoring’ the right to have a restaurant there, just like the good old Rex Café.

I LIVE ON Argyle Street, between two of Halifax’s most talked-about vacant lots. The new central library and the proposed convention centre may be a few short blocks away from one another, but they represent very different ideas about the role of government.

The library serves hundreds of thousands of HRM residents, and has been doing so from a cramped old building for quite some time. Critics of the new library, including some of the commentariat on this newpaper’s website, have been quick to cry government waste. Fifty-five million?!? You can get books on the Internet if you want to waste your time — ew! — reading.

Never mind that many people need the library to use the Internet. The bigger point critics are making is that the government should not be providing public services or spaces. And to think I thought that was their job!

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe the government’s role is to provide the public infrastructure — libraries, schools, roads, cops — that frees us to do things like start businesses or create jobs. However, some want to cut out that pesky public step, and just hand our money to private concerns. That’s a lot more proactive than waiting for them to fail and then bailing them out.

How can Nova Scotians possibly pass up another golden opportunity to spend money it does not have subsidizing the private sector? It’s Bluenose tradition to hand a bag of tax moolah to any business lobby that repeats the magic J-word. Surely we all recall how benevolent agencies like ACOA, in concert with unimpeachable business concerns, turned Cape Breton into a fully employed, prosperous utopia.

The WTCC proposal is not just an example of politics as usual, but a reflection of our business practices. A pal once told me a story about his dad, who teaches at one of the local business schools. On the first day of his entrepreneurship class, he asked his students what they would do first if they wanted to launch a new business. Their answer? “Apply for government grants!”

This is not to say that the WTCC boosters are risk-averse pseudo-preneurs. Perish the thought! Rather, they think investing is so awesome that they want to make sure every Nova Scotian, young and old, rich and poor, enjoys the rush.

According to their latest numbers, released last week, if we build it, and they come, we will reap $170 million in tax revenues. If we stick with the like, totally lame and embarrassing facilities we already have, we’ll make a measly $79 million.

These guesstimates allowed me to perform the following calculation: $170 million, minus the $100 million figure everyone keeps bandying about, equals $70 million. Which is $9 million less than $79 million.

Doubtless one of the consultants or flacks involved will rush to correct my rube math — subtraction is sooo old economy — and paint me as the enemy of progress. But what really depresses me about the convention centre is that this is what passes for progress in the HRM: a great glassy hope that may well turn out to be a costly white elephant.

Many experts argue that the convention market has been in steady decline since the late ‘90s. Moreover, it is likely this decline will continue for technological reasons. As more and more digitally literate people move into management, pricey meatspace schmoozefests will be replaced by cheaper virtual meetings.

Moreover, the WTCC boosters must attend much more leisurely, life-transforming conferences than yours truly. Every conference I have attended has consisted of three to four very busy days of meetings. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you make it to the TGIFriday’s next to the hotel. I think it’s unlikely that conference-goers will relocate their families and businesses based on such short stays. I think it’s doubly unlikely that they will do so based on their view of the abandoned Dooley’s on Barrington.

Downtown Halifax needs more empty commercial space like the harbour needs more poop. Ill-paid service gigs will not stanch our brain drain or foster greater economic autonomy. A truly innovative development strategy would encourage Nova Scotians to make something more enduring than warm welcomes and cocktails. The “new” convention centre is just a splashy version of something older than your Grandma: the parlour that is reserved for Christmas and company.

Downtown Halifax needs more empty commercial space like the harbour needs more poop.

Laura Penny is the author of More Money Than Brains and Your Call is Important to Us. She is a professor at Mount Saint Vincent University.

I am in favor of a new or expanded WTCC.

I do not, at this time support the current proposal.

Wanting more information does not make one a visionless small town hick.

I am waiting for an actual business plan, having concerns over the architecture, the SIP P3 model, worrying about giving the private developer office towers twice the size allowed on those blocks under HRMbD and ALSO gives the private developer $100 million of taxpayers dollars.

People talking about this as a “catalytic building” in down town are just using buzz words to paper over the lack of actual hard information. Show me, Paul, show me, WTCC, show me how our 4th largest CC in Canada will not lose money every year, will not cost additional millions, will not spiral down into disrepair like all the other P3 projects the province has launched.

Show me how our isolated, hard to get to, but beautiful and picturesque destination will succeeded, and not fail, like the recent Vancouver CC.

Asking hard questions and getting no answers and then digging in your heels is only natural. Pro-WTCC2 advocates trying to paint a picture of caution and inquiry as being backwards and timid is, at best, insulting.

Anyone who follows me on Facebook or Twitter knows I just spent two weeks in Tuscany with my family, and being the nerd I am, I kept taking pictures of infrastructure. A photo essay will come later, with bus tickets, closed streets, etc, but tonight I want to show how the world class capital of the Tuscany region, Florence, a city of 400,000 people, a UNESCO world heritage site, does bike lanes:

Two Way Bike Lane in Florence, Tuscany, IT

Note that it was more important to this world class city to have two way dedicated, isolated bike lanes than to have two way traffic for cars.

HRM needs to get a clue.