Whatever Happened to Pleasant Street? Rediscovering an Urban Shoreline

Abstract

North American cities were frequently archipelagos in origin and ports by design, made extensions of continents only as part of the modern projects of capitalism and state building.3 Recognizing this, scholars of urban and coastal history are increasingly immersing their subjects in water, whether fresh or salt. I have been haunted by Andrew Lipman’s description of living in Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy, when flooding “exposed the island’s long-lost face, as the high waterline traced the contours of the seventeenth-century coastline.”4 Tellingly, Sandy also prompted the city’s mayor to take an unprecedented public stance about the impacts of climate change. As Stephen Mosley cautions, “as urban centres have become the main battle-grounds where sustainability and climate change are concerned, the need for a historically informed understanding of the interconnections between cities and their environments—and especially between cities and the sea—has become increasingly urgent.”5 Environmental history in Atlantic Canada, though, has skirted its cities, so it is time to look at Halifax through an environmental lens.6