I hadn't spent a weekend in Halifax since the pandemic hit, so I approached the one just past with the excitement of someone revisiting an old friend.
Like all cities, Halifax's rhythm and vibe is different from Friday night to Monday morning, even at a time when the lockdown has blurred the difference between the traditional work week, and the unshackled-by-toil weekend.
That the weather was stunning seemed right, since all September weekends are golden in this city, when the chlorophyll begins to recede from the hardwood leaves.
There even seemed to be an extra bounce to people's step, as if, in the year of COVID and Portapique, we realized that the gods had decreed we have had enough and granted us a sun that shone more brightly than usual for this time of year.
Yet things were different as I set off for some of my usual weekend haunts, as they had to be.
I knew that Halifax is a big-shouldered city now, a city under permanent construction, where, even then, the rental vacancy rate is still less than one per cent.
I was not, however, ready for a place that is such a work in progress that there are parts that I barely recognized; the blockish structures — promising the usual combination of retail and residential — rising in unexpected places; the huge holes surrounded by wooden facades showing artist renderings of the happy faced joggers and latte-drinkers who will soon frolic at that very spot; the streetscapes bearing the white signs from HRM'S city planning department warning that we should memorize whatever is there now, because it will not be there for long.
“I guess we're a big city now,” my wife said as we stood at the corner of Robie Street and Quinpool Road, where everywhere we turned, the familiar was disappearing, the new arising, seemingly from the bowels of the Earth, like in the title sequence of Game of Thrones.
She was, truthfully, just fooling around. Halifax, with more than 440,000 people, according to the most recent stats, is tiny compared to other cities in which we've lived.
Yet it punches way above its weight, ranking high in everything from quality of life to fostering innovation, all of which are good things.
When, however, you have history here — when you can recall a time that people stood beneath Park Victoria, as awestruck as ancient Egyptians before the pyramids — you can feel like a bit of a hayseed moving through streets in mid-transformation as they seemed to be on the weekend.
Traffic, it is my memory, used to move along at a steady place. Not, therefore, as it did on Saturday and Sunday where it was gridlocked everywhere we went, whether main thoroughfares like Robie, Agricola, North and Young, and even the little side streets that used to be dependable shortcuts.
I know I was not alone in finding the going hard. On Saturday, someone I was supposed to meet for a beer got snarled in traffic coming over the bridge from Dartmouth. Eventually he just said the hell with it and, leaving his spouse at the wheel, exited the passenger's side, setting out on foot for our meeting place.
There are, no doubt, perfectly reasonable explanations for the logjam: a busy weekend in September, for all I know, is actually a good time for a full-court press on the street construction; there is some sort of method to when and why those hand-held traffic signs are flipped from stop to slow.
On the other hand, maybe it's just as simple as my wife says.
Was the mild funk I detected on some residential and commercial streets — the gamey stench that put me right back in our Toronto neighbourhood — a sign that our city has finally grown up?
Was the way the streets in our university neighbourhood, always a little crazy this time of year, teemed like never before with blotto, sometimes belligerent, students, on Saturday, just what happens when a place comes of age?
Is plowing under the old buildings, the places with history and sometimes even a little pizzazz, to make room for the new and anodyne just the price of progress?
I guess we will find out.
