In 1981, a Halifax neighbourhood renamed itself to escape Gottingen Street’s reputation. In 2015, a developer tried the same move in reverse, on the same street, and lost.
Ask a city planner what’s in a name and they’ll point you to an addressing bylaw. Ask anyone who’s lived in Halifax’s north end the last few decades, and they’ll tell you that on this street, a name has never been just a name.
A street split by an explosion
Gottingen Street dates to 1764, when a group of German settlers petitioned the government to name the road after Göttingen, the town in Lower Saxony most of them had left behind. For 150 years it was one street, running from the Halifax Common toward Fort Needham.
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Then, on December 6, 1917, the Halifax Explosion levelled the street’s northern stretch and left the south end largely standing. City planner Thomas Adams rebuilt the north as the Hydrostone, a tidy, deliberately designed neighbourhood that drew a middle class population through the postwar years. The south end took the opposite path. Suburbanization and decades of thin city planning drained it (its population fell from 13,070 people in 1961 to 7,584 by 1971, most of them tenants). The new Cogswell Interchange sliced the neighbourhood off from downtown. Uniacke Square, a public housing project built in 1966, became home to many families displaced from Africville, the Black community the city bulldozed and relocated in the 1960s.
By the 1970s, “Gottingen Street” had become shorthand in Halifax for one thing: a poor, Black neighbourhood people were told to be afraid of.
The survey that only asked half the street
In early 1981, 219 residents of the Hydrostone end of Gottingen Street, the stretch north of Young Street, signed a petition asking the city to rename their section. Halifax surveyed 171 of them. It never asked anyone living south of Young Street, the part of Gottingen the petitioners were trying to distance themselves from.
The responses the city collected, later obtained and published by the Nova Scotia Advocate, are direct about why. “Tired of living under the Gottingen Street stigma,” one resident wrote. Another: “We would like the name of Gottingen Street changed to Novalea Drive, because we are of people thinking we are in a ‘Slum Area,’ we take pride in our homes in the north end.” A third complained that news reports blamed “North End” crime on the whole area, when the incident in question happened blocks from their door.
The vote came months after Halifax’s police went on strike in May 1981, a strike that turned into a riot outside the force’s headquarters on Gottingen Street. A crowd of roughly 300 threw rocks and bottles and smashed windows in shops up and down the block. Residents who lived through it say the memory was still fresh when council took up the renaming.
Alderman Graham Downey, Halifax’s first Black councillor, asked for the whole street to be consulted before any vote. He was outvoted. He asked again when the rename itself came to the floor. He was outvoted again. The official reason council gave was that the Hydrostone section was residential while Gottingen proper was commercial, a distinction north end researcher Kevin Collins later pointed out Halifax never bothered to apply anywhere else in the city. Quinpool Road, just as residential west of Connaught Avenue, kept its name.
The street became Novalea Drive. It still is.
Map location is approximate and may not reflect the exact location.
“There are scars to this day”
African Nova Scotian activist Lynn Jones remembers exactly when it happened, and she has never called it Novalea. Neither have a lot of her neighbours. “People who were around at the time still call it Gottingen,” Jones told the Nova Scotia Advocate in 2018. “They refuse to call it Novalea. So there are scars to this day.”
In 2018, Jones and Collins pushed publicly, through the Advocate and then CTV Atlantic, to have council revisit the name, pointing to Halifax’s own restoration of the historic Lucasville community boundaries as proof the city knew how to undo this kind of decision when it wanted to. As far as this reporting can determine, nothing came of it. No vote, no staff report, no public update since.
The developer who tried the same move, and lost
Three decades after Hydrostone residents seceded from Gottingen Street to protect their address, somebody on the other end of the street tried to do the same thing for the same reason, and Halifax said no.
In 2015, the city redesigned the North Park Street and Cogswell Street intersection, which turned the lower stretch of Rainnie Drive, the short road that curves under Citadel Hill, into a continuous extension of Gottingen Street. Municipal addressing rules don’t allow one uninterrupted road to carry two names, so on November 24, 2015, regional council voted to fold that stretch of Rainnie Drive into Gottingen Street.
A developer was mid-construction on the site at the time, an eight-storey mixed commercial and residential building. Its address was about to change from Rainnie Drive to Gottingen Street, and the developer did not want that. In a letter to councillors, the developer wrote that his company had paid a “premium” for the site “in recognition of the heritage of the street name,” and that a Gottingen Street address would “adversely affect” the building’s “marketability and ultimately the profitability.” Councillor Linda Mosher moved to defer the whole renaming so staff could look for an alternative name for the block. Her motion failed 10 to 5.
One Halifax street. Two attempts to control what its name says about the people on it. Only one of them worked, and it wasn’t the one that came from City Hall’s own survey.
Sources
- Nova Scotia Advocate: “Novalea IS Gottingen, plain and simple”
- CTV Atlantic: “Novalea or Gottingen? Advocates push to revisit Halifax street name change”
- Stephen Kimber: “A Pearl by any other place?”
- Spacing Atlantic: “What’s in a Name: Gottingen to Novalea”
- The Coast: “27 developments that are changing Halifax’s cityscape” (The Pearl entry)
- Halifax.ca: “Lower Section of Rainnie Drive to be Renamed Gottingen Street”
- CBC: “Hundreds gather for unity march on Halifax’s Gottingen Street in 1991”
- CBC: “Halifax welcomes Buddy Daye Street”
- Delmore Buddy Daye Learning Institute: biography
- UPI Archives: May 1981 Halifax police strike coverage
Haligonia is not a media outlet, and we do not employ journalists. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, this post is for informational purposes only.
