Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 9

Halifax Waterfront Buildings: An Historical Report

by Susan Buggey

Simon's Building

Historical Information

The granite-faced walls and the slate roofing of the building at the head of the Central Wharf reflected the heady prosperity of mid-19th-century Halifax. The structure was built in an era of the wartime riches of Crimea and the looming American Civil War, of the wealth of the West Indies trade and approaching reciprocity with the United States.

The site was by no means a new one. By the mid-1780s the Honourable Alexander Brymer, merchant, gentleman and councillor, had already erected buildings on his wharf which extended southward from the Ordnance Yard at the foot of Buckingham Street (Fig. 5). In 1805, however, the only noteworthy structure on the wharf was "A LARGE substantial building" which was "commonly used as a stable, coach-house, &c."¹ After 1810, when Haligonian merchants Charles Prescott and William Lawson sold the north side of their wharf to John Clark, he rented the two buildings along the north side to the Ordnance department whose yard adjoined them. As he had already established himself in the rich American wartime trade,² he probably occupied the ell-shaped building at the south head of the wharf himself, at least until the middle of the decade when he apparently erected the Privateer's Warehouse fronting the harbour.³ When James N. Shannon Jr. opened his "New Store" with "New GOODS" from London at the "head of Clark's wharf" in 1819, his shop may have been the ell-shaped structure vacated by Clark. Shannon and his successors—the prominent dry-goods firm of James Lyon & Company and the successful auctioneers and commission merchants David and Edward Starr, who later erected the building now known as Morse's Teas—more likely. however, occupied the extensive store at the north head of the wharf which the Ordnance department had surrendered in mid-1818.⁴ No identifiable tenant occupied the ell-shaped building through the 1820s, and Clark may have continued to use it himself.

How long this structure remained cannot be determined. The substantial increase in the assessable value of Clark's Wharf during the early 1830s suggests that a new store had been erected; it may have replaced this old and small building. The latter may, however, have been the low wooden building which adjoined Collins' stone store to the north in 1854. In that year William, son and heir of John Clark, took down the wooden structure and in its place erected the edifice which stands today.⁵

The subsequent history of the building reflects the ups and downs of Halifax as a commercial community. William Clark apparently had not his father's business acumen and, like many others during the 1850s, overreached himself in undertaking to erect his new stone store. Within the succeeding four years he found it necessary to mortgage his wharf to his wealthy neighbour Enos Collins; heavily mortgaged, Clark died intestate in 1859, leaving debts well in excess of his liquid assets. His widow, under licence of the Court of Probate, subsequently had the wharf sold at auction to relieve the financial stringencies of the estate.⁶ R. W. Fraser, an established commission merchant, bought the premises for £8,500, cleared the mortgage, and immediately sold all of the property except the Simon's Building to two separate mercantile firms.⁷ Fraser himself occupied the building he retained for warehousing and retailing the groceries he imported from Baltimore, Philadelphia and Richmond. He continued to occupy premises on the wharf until 1874, and he may have used the eastern half of the building for his concerns until then.⁸

About 1865 Fraser let the impressive stone store facing Water Street to Esson & Company, a recently reorganized and prosperous grocery business which surrendered its retail activities on Barrington Street and confined its Haligonian enterprise during the next 20 years to wholesaling from its new office and warehouse. An old and respected firm, it imported West Indies produce, American groceries, Asian teas, and British liquors which it traded throughout the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland; by the early 1880s its business was valued at nearly half a million dollars a year. After Fraser sold the edifice in 1880, Esson & Company owned as well as occupied the premises at the south head of the wharf.⁹ In 1888, nevertheless, hard times, over-extension and long unsettled financial affairs drove the firm into receivership. Its premises were rated as "convenient, centrally situated, and in every way a desirable business stand" when advertised for subsequent sale at auction.¹⁰

James A. Chipman, the new owner, occupied the western half of the "large and commodious . . . Granite Warehouse," while Miner T. Foster, tea merchant, later insurance and mining agent, appears to have rented the eastern portion.¹¹ Chipman's flour and feed business apparently flourished, but within ten years he sold the property and probably the interest of the firm to his junior since 1881, Ingraham B. Shaffner, and his new partner James Adams.¹² Shaffner was an enterprising merchant who, through effective advertising and reliable service, expanded the flour, feed and grain trade into a prominent and prosperous business. By 1909 the firm was dealing extensively in its own brands of flour as well as in "all grades of Manitoba flour, Western feed in large quantities, grain, etc." and was regarded as "among the leading houses in [Nova Scotia] identified with the business."¹³ In 1917, however, Shaffner sold the Upper Water Street premises to George H. Hooper.¹⁴

In 1919 the property was again transferred, from Hooper to J. B. Mitchell. C. E. Creighton and Son housed their wholesale grocery business there from 1920 to 1923, while the Franco Canadian Import Company thereafter rented the store until the early 1930s.¹⁵ The building was owned by Joseph Simon, a successful junk dealer, from 1937 until the City of Halifax expropriated the property in 1968¹⁶ to make way for its intended Harbour Drive and an improved sewerage system.

Architectural Information

The two-walled structure built in 1854 stands equal in height with Enos Collins' stone store adjoining it to the south. The three-and-one-half storey building used 129 ft. of the north wall of the latter in common, and on the east it utilized the 38 ft. 3 in. gable end of the Privateer's Warehouse. Its own north wall ran 69 ft. 6 in. parallel to the Collins' property line, then angled 61 ft. southwest toward Water Street where its west front measured only 26 ft. 6 in.¹⁷ Dressed granite blocks backed up by rubble stone constituted the north and west walls; the regularly coursed west wall was surface dressed as befitted a commercial office of importance, but the north wall, randomly coursed, remained rough (Fig. 43). The building was originally intended to have a crowning roof of zinc which would connect the ridge of a hipped slate roof with the older, similar roof of the adjoining store.¹⁸

No early pictures of the building have been located to indicate its appearance before the apparently extensive remodelling of its west end. Architectural evidence reveals alteration in the first-floor windows and doors on the north and west walls, but no documentary evidence as to the nature of these changes has been found. Esson & Company, who rented the building from 1865 and purchased it in 1880, appear most likely to have remodelled it during the early 1880s.¹⁹

Detailed views of the edifice in the late 19th and early 20th century reveal little change in the exterior appearance of the building during that period.²⁰ The hipped truncated roof facing Water Street, which united the Simon's and Collins' buildings, gave the outward appearance of topping a single structure. Its crown appears to have been composition rather than the intended zinc. The east end was also hipped, and a projection from its north edge protected the joint between the Simon's Building and the adjoining Privateer's Warehouse from leakage (Figs. 23, 51). Three hoistway dormers ranged along the north side of the roof; goods were thus lifted through the parallel loading doors beneath into the upper storage areas of the warehouse. On the north side of the west hip was a single skylight. Projecting eaves trimmed the roof edge, but no rafters protruded beneath them. The drain pipe at the northwest corner of the building, dilapidated by the early 20th century, still hung in place; its less wasted companion at the southwest edge may have been of later date or may only have fared better from its more protected situation. A single stack stone chimney topped the structure.²¹

The location of the doors and windows along the west front continues unchanged since the 1880s; slight alterations had, however, already taken place in their details by the early 20th century. The basic form was a flat lugsilled aperture. This style remained, although the plain lintels sketched above the second- and third-floor windows were not confirmed by photograph, and one awning on the street level had been removed. On the ground floor the double windows were set inside a cast-iron frame. Although the 1887 engraving indicates two-over-two sashes on the west wall, the 1909 photograph shows that earlier style six-over-six sashes were then still in place; presumably the artist who created the engraving attempted to upgrade the building by depicting the more fashionable two-over-two sashes. By the early 20th century, the single-leaf, three-panel door of the 1880s had been replaced by a double door with a circular-headed, glazed panel in each leaf.

The north wall is likewise largely unaltered. Five rows of parallel windows on each of the three floors reached from the northwest corner to the first set of loading doors, the bottom one of which was one column offset to the east. Two additional ranks of windows completed the angled wall of the structure. All the windows were shown in 1887 as topped with plain lintels, but the photograph of 1909 again failed to confirm this decoration. All contained double-hung sashes; the paning is, however, impossible to determine. As along the west front, the ground-floor windows were noticeably taller than those on the second and third floors. Moreover, by 1909 the fifth window from the west on the ground level appears to have been broader than the preceding four. A drain pipe extended between the third and fourth rows of windows in both views (Figs. 42, 43).

No major alteration to the exterior appearance of the building occurred until 1935. After an extensive fire spread through the upper storey of the building on Christmas Day 1934²² a flat roof replaced the damaged hipped truncated roof (Fig. 54). Subsequently, at the east end of the north wall, an enlarged door topped with a steel beam was opened to allow trucked goods to enter the interior directly. The symmetrical pattern of the wall was thus interrupted. Less elegant window panes also replaced the large arched glass panels in the north wall, and a more functional door superseded the circular-headed, glazed panels.²³

Almost no information has been found about the interesting interior of this building. A wooden partition, beginning at the point of angle in the north wall and extending in line with the fire wall of the adjoining stone warehouse, apparently at one time divided the structure (Fig. 16). By 1895, a gas engine had been installed in the premises (Fig. 17), and by 1914 a wooden partition, parallel with and somewhat north of the party wall, had been added in the attic (Fig. 18). The most recent owner covered the boarded ceiling of the main office with acoustic tiles and the upstairs walls with beaverboard.²⁴ The uneven floor levels, the herringbone brick paving in the rear portion, and the plaster in the basement survive from an unrecorded past.²⁵