Continuity at Coburg corner
For the past eight months there has been a little mystery in our neighbourhood: what was going to happen to the building that housed the Coburg Social on the corner of Halifax’s Coburg Road and Henry Street?
It wasn’t the sort of question that spawned community meetings and hand-wringing stories in the Chronicle Herald. Yet, I wasn’t the only local resident who peeked inside its lightless windows, and then, when the construction fence appeared around the perimeter, stopped, wondering, outside.
Now, for me at least, the mystery is solved.
I am in and out of Halifax these days. So, I did not know that the Coburg Animal Hospital had been taking patients for more than a month when I noticed the sign on the weekend.
I may have punched the sky in joy discovering that something praiseworthy, that serves the people of this community, had taken up residence there. The building and I go way back.
There was a time when I would have jumped on my bicycle — perhaps with a Harmon Killebrew Topps baseball card fastened to the wheel spokes with a clothespin — and peeled through the Halifax streets to the side door of the building, then known as Faders Drug Store.
Inside, I would have spun the comic rack, hoping that the new Daredevil had arrived, then handed over my empty Mountain Dew bottle for the two-cent refund, which, with the dime in my pocket, would have guaranteed I would again sample that hillbilly brew.
RICH HISTORY
I didn’t know then that the store had been located downtown until the V-E Day riots in May of 1945, when fire destroyed several businesses including Fader’s Pharmacy.
Or that at the start of the Second World War, that building on the north side of Coburg Road had been a set of apartments or a rooming house that was home to Mona W. Fleming, Frank M. Jones and his wife Jean, Mrs. Mary Headand, and Mrs. Ida Mitchell.
Over at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia I discovered that in 1928, the same building housed Freeman’s Pharmacy, and three years earlier a fruit-selling business owned by Allen P. Rufus, or Rufus P. Allen depending upon how you read the listing in Mcalpine’s Halifax City directory.
When the First World War began, the good people of Halifax entered 29 Coburg Road — as it was then known before the street numbers changed — to buy their envelopes, writing paper, and ink wells at John A. Chisholm’s stationary operation.
In peace time, Mrs. Mary Hart sold groceries there. At the dawn of the 20th century, a man named James Hart made his home in that very same building.
So, ghosts may have still walked there when I perused the shelves for Mojos and Black Cat gum. The pharmacy changed with the times, becoming a bona fide purveyor of potions and elixirs by the time I hit junior high, then adding a lunch counter, right out of Happy Days, when I was in high school.
COFFEE AND STRONGER LIBATIONS
Somewhere along the line, perhaps when I was living elsewhere, the building’s days as a drug store ended. It became a coffee house, catering to the university crowd, then, in 2012, was bought by Kelly Irvine and Jane Merchant, who added a liquor licence and turned it into the Coburg Social.
So entranced was I to one night sit outside on its patio sipping an adult beverage that I wrote an entire column about the transcendent quality of the experience.
I used to slip in there from time to time during the day to work on my laptop.
Often, amidst the MBA students tackling group projects, the sociology majors, the aspiring classicists and dental hygienists, I would see somebody from the neighborhood taking their time over their newspaper or catching a post-work-out latte.
I liked to see them in there because it gave a sense of continuity to things. The building at the corner of Coburg and Henry hasn’t changed much in the 60 years, on and off, I have lived in that neighourhood and walked through its doors.
That matters at a time when we’re in a city seemingly in constant flux.
DEVELOPMENT DANGER
The outcome at the corner of Coburg and Henry could have been different. Realtors had been marketing the building as a place that could be turned into a money-spinning apartment complex.
The rumour was that a developer planned to do just that. Then, somehow, the narrative changed. In 2022, it was bought by Kathryn Finlayson, a vet with another clinic in Stewiacke, who understood the building was something special.
“If you are going put an effort into updating and renovating an historical building,” she told me Tuesday, “you want to do a good job.”
She has. The exterior of the building is still under construction. But Finlayson looked at some old archival pictures and made sure the paint mirrors the bluish shade the building wore when Faders was in its heyday.
The inside of the clinic — which has a surgery and rooms for x-raying and performing dental procedures on small animals — is white and roomy. But it pays homage to the building’s past through a mural from the Social that remains on one of the walls.
Knowing the place’s past iterations, I can picture where I used to slurp my coffee and stare out the window when I should have been typing.
If I squint hard, I think maybe I can see a kid in the corner. He has a bowl haircut, and a scabby knee, breathing hard, google-eyed with anticipation.