Spring Garden College

Developer hopes Spring Garden Road neighbours share vision

Halifax developer Louis Lawen doesn’t know what he’ll call the 22-storey apartment complex his company is proposing to build on Spring Garden Road, but he’s open to suggestions.

Lawen, president of Dexel Developments Ltd., has assembled a number of properties along the south side of Spring Garden Road — from Carlton Street to a building that was once a Tim Hortons outlet — with a plan to raze the wooden structures and replace them with the apartment highrise.

The idea is still in the preliminary stages and Lawen hopes to be able to negotiate a development agreement that would be an amendment to development rules.

He’s also had discussions with the owners of the buildings adjacent to his about extending the development along Spring Garden all the way to the corner at Robie Street. Lawen believes redeveloping the whole block that fronts on Spring Garden Road makes a lot of sense, rather than doing it piecemeal.

But the people who own the other buildings aren’t in the residential apartment business, he says, so there is some reluctance to combine efforts.

The developer — who is well known for revitalizing the historic Greenvale School in Dartmouth by turning it into Greenvale Lofts, and who has received critical approval of his W Suites project on the site of the former YWCA on Barrington Street —says he’s sensitive to the need for quality construction in the city.

No matter how sensitive he is, Lawen has been criticized by heritage groups known for resisting the desire to tear down older buildings and put up new ones taller than six storeys.

In the planning stages of his 10-storey Victoria Suites apartment building at the corner of Hollis and Morris streets, Lawen was able to find a compromise with heritage groups who were concerned construction would lead to the demise of a 230-year-old building on the site.

A dilapidated 19th-century apartment building on the property couldn’t be saved but heritage supporters fought to preserve the small building, once owned by Halifax’s first surveyor general, Charles Morris. A compromise was reached and the old building was moved to a nearby lot.

Considering the projects he’s planning now will be around for at least another 100 years, Lawen says he wants to work with the city to create a project that everyone will be proud of.

He says he likes building apartments on the Halifax peninsula because there is demand, and it follows the city’s desire to increase urban density.

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The school went bankrupt a few years after purchasing the campus of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf on Germantown Avenue, near the Mermaid Lane site.  At the time school enrollment was declining and the school could not maintain financial viability.

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