Salvation and the Hurricane

The building that was 2412 Agricola Street in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has been torn down, and the ground that held it is being dusted with snow for the first time. Six years ago, with a heady ambition, I had attempted to buy that building, only to preserve what was happening inside it.

It was called Salvation, and was billed as an Art Space, which can be many things although economically viable is not one of them. Initiated by Eric Gunnells and Shane Dwyer, a jewellery designer and painter respectively, Salvation was intended to provide the pair with a place to create and sell their work. But all those original intentions changed the first time they turned on the coffee urn.

Coffee was a dollar. Give or take. Half the artists and the unemployed of Halifax’s north end would trickle through the doors midday, and nurse cold cups of the stuff for hours on end. They started coming with guitars. They started coming with guitars and pads of paper and bits of charcoal, and eventually with very big ideas.

Throughout the months in the ever-expanding empire, a handful of us would appoint ourselves as co-owners. In the chill of youth, we were joining en masse to survive the gentrification of our neighbourhood, making art for the sake of making art, chalking the sidewalks in celebration of our unhinged existence. Eventually the walls of Salvation would house art auctions, poetry readings, live music, dance parties, a hair salon, a speakeasy, and at one point live up to the secular meaning of the name, and provide a respite.

Hurricane Juan tore through Halifax in September 2003, and most of us lost power for up to eight days. Trees and telephone poles blocked the streets and invaded bedroom windows. Everything – Everything stopped in its tracks. I would walk from Brenton Street, flashlight in hand, brazenly marching in the middle of the road past Citadel Hill, and to the glowing doors of our Art Space.

Eric Gunnells was brewing coffee on a Coleman stove, and the place had never seen so much business. We gathered more propane stoves and barbeques, and cooked up anything that threatened to go to waste. And for eight days, those walls were full to the brim with music and dance and merriment in the closeness of necessary candlelight and company.

I remember the moment the power was restored. There were two precise expressions that travelled through each face. Joyous relief, followed shortly thereafter by poignant sadness. We parted ways then, heading to our respective homes to spark our hot water heaters and charge our cell phones. And over the next few months, Salvation petered out, and all its owners and friends moved on, or perhaps back, to other things.

An Art Space is something I’ve been privileged to have in my life fairly often, though that presence is something that disappeared with my twenties. It was the drama and angst of proof all wrapped up in a burlap bow, and I miss it terribly, though there is nothing in the world of enough worth to make me want it again. We were a community of beautiful losers who required an audience, and finally bowed to each other a lovingly quiet curtain call. Salvation did not end with a bang. It backed away slowly, genuflected, and vanished.

Nowadays my community is scattered. Some of us perpetually on tour, others at home with bread and babies, and a small few are buried and gone. 2412 Agricola Street will become a building of condominiums, I imagine.

Change is not a stopwatch, though. It is not so simple that a place is there one moment and gone the next. The effects of our time in such a self-propelled environment are in photographs and statues and paintings and songs. It is all the things that are willing to bend, that the hurricane did not take.

Link: www.ameliacurran.com