Out of the wasteland
August 10, 2007
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By BILL POWER
Business Reporter
The rush that comes with breaking a home-run record is what baseball players crave.
For Glenn Munro, managing director of North American Development Group, evidence of a similar rush was apparent Thursday as the property developer breathed in the vista of the retail portion of the sprawling Dartmouth Crossing project unfolding near the convergence of highways 107, 111 and 118 in Dartmouth.
Part of the thrill of this project he said, has been witnessing the miraculous transformation of a neglected urban wasteland into a shopping and entertainment destination of national proportions, a location that includes many environmental and people friendly
touches, such as the reclamation of some waterways and a pedestrian walkway to Shubie Park on the other side of Highway 118, he said.
“It was used. It was abused. It was categorized as brown field (an urban site). It was not hugely polluted, but there were issues.
There was a dump, an asphalt plant, some oil spills,” he said of the site adjacent to Burnside Park that was an active quarry until development began.
People involved with the Dartmouth Crossing undertaking gathered at the shopping section of the site to mark the official opening of the first 35 locations.
These range from massive big-box outlets like Home Depot and Wal-Mart to a collection of much smaller boutiques in the Main Street shopping area and cover 700,000 square feet of retail space, slightly more than nearby Mic Mac Mall.
A rapid pace of development is continuing with another 300,000 square feet of retail space scheduled to open before Christmas, with new arrivals to include the country’s largest Canadian Tire and Nova Scotia’s first Best Buy retail location.
If the project continues to unfold on schedule, it should slightly surpass the Bayers Lake shopping district by Christmas of next year with 1.5 million square feet of shopping, dining and entertainment space under various roofs.
There are also ambitious plans for office and residential development at the site, which has a ready market with about 17,000 workers at neighbouring Burnside Park.
Mr. Munro traced the origins of the project to a detour on a kayaking trip to Newfoundland a few years ago that found him in the offices of a Halifax property management firm eyeballing topographical drawings for an area adjacent to Burnside Park considered by
many to be a development challenge.
He said he went for it right away.
“Rarely do you see an available block of land of this size in the middle of a municipality the size of Halifax,” he said of the 511-acre location.
There was no shortage of superlatives as people close to the project gathered to celebrate the successful transformation of the site from wasteland to shopping district.
“Thousands of people will work here; millions of people will shop here,” said Tourism Minister Len Goucher.
Mayor Peter Kelly noted the developers did a “fantastic job” of land reclamation and praised the attention to environmental details.
“The addition of new trails, parks and refurbished waterways will add greatly to the Shubie Park trail system,” he said.
But critics of Dartmouth Crossing were only as far away as the nearest Metro Transit bus stop, where workers at the some of the new stores were arriving in the wind and rain to begin their shifts.
“The bus service sucks. There is only one bus every half-hour and there are no shelters, so if it is raining you get soaked,” said one young worker who did not want to be identified.
Metro Transit said they are working on it.
“We upgraded service in May and will continue to upgrade through 2008 and 2009 as new businesses open,” spokeswoman Lori Patterson said of public transit service to the area.
For drivers, the key access points to Dartmouth Crossing are via Burnside—take Exit 3 on Highway 111 and turn right at Commodore Drive—or via the new Wright Avenue exit on Highway 118.
