The Cogswell Interchange is gone. What now for the Black families it uprooted?

Manny Grosse was the seventh child born to Henry and Irene Grouse when the family lived on Jacob Street. Grosse says his surname is different from his parents' due to a nurse's spelling error at birth. (Dan Jardine/CBC)

Elizabeth Chiu · CBC News · Posted: Aug 06, 2024

Manny Grosse, 73, has lived his whole life in Halifax, most of it in public housing. 

So have eight of his 10 siblings who, like Grosse, moved into public housing and started families there.

It didn't begin that way.   

Grosse was baby No. 7 when his parents, Henry and Irene Grouse, were renting on Jacob Street. Their neighbourhood, just south of where Cogswell and Brunswick streets met, saw poor and working-class families living in wooden tenements dating back to the 1800s.

But in the 1960s, those Victorian-era homes on 10 blocks were bulldozed in the name of urban renewal. White, immigrant and many Black families, including the Grouses, were forced out to make way for the Cogswell interchange and the massive concrete buildings that were constructed around it.

Women carry boxes up Jacob Street to Brunswick Street in 1953. The Grouse family lived on Jacob Street in the early '50s. (Halifax Municipal Archives)

Six decades later, that interchange, which came to be viewed as a gigantic urban planning mistake and an eyesore, has been demolished. It has opened up some 6.5 hectares of land — the size of 21 football fields — for redevelopment once again. 

Sitting at the heart of it is a piece of land that serves as a reminder of a forgotten community, and now also the hope of an African Nova Scotian group to build a new community on its own terms. 

It's called Parcel D.

The uprooting of Black families from the Cogswell area was part of a larger pattern of displacing Black residents, including the razing of Africville, a historic Black settlement of 400 families.