Canada Guide
The Maritime Provinces
The Historic Properties
From the Maritime Museum, it's an agreeable 400m stroll north along the waterfront to the much-vaunted Historic Properties, comprising an area of refurbished wharves, warehouses and merchants' quarters situated below Upper Water Street – and just beyond the Dartmouth and Woodside ferry terminal. The ensemble has a certain charm – all bars, boutiques and bistros – and the narrow lanes and alleys still maintain the shape of the harbourfront during the days of sail, but there's not much to see unless the schooner Bluenose II is moored here, as it often is during the summer. The original Bluenose, whose picture is on the 10¢ coin, was famed throughout Canada as the fastest vessel of its kind in the 1920s, although she ended her days ingloriously as a freighter, foundering off Haiti in 1946. The replica has spent several years as a floating standard-bearer for Nova Scotia, but it's now on its last sea legs and its future is uncertain. Pressure groups are campaigning either to have it refurbished or berthed permanently here at Halifax or at its home port of Lunenburg.