Tag: glacebay

How AI created a new Time Zone for Cape Breton, and other stories of out East

I like to collect stories of where I was born and raised and the surrounding areas, which in this case is Cape Breton, a very special place. Perhaps not as special as Newfoundland, which has it’s own time zone. Or maybe it is as special as Newfoundland. Turns out when you ask Google if Cape Breton has it’s own time zone, it thinks it does! More on that story, here: No, Meta and Google, Cape Breton doesn’t have its own time zone.

Cape Breton may not have it’s own time zone, but it does have it’s own university. Alas, Cape Breton University faces budget cuts up to $20M due to international student cap. That’s grim.

There’s housing crises everywhere these days, and Nova Scotia is no exception. Reading these two statistics from Stats Canada, 1) 3 in 10 residential property buyers in N.S. were investors in 2018-2020: StatsCan and 2) More than 65% of Nova Scotians experienced a housing challenge in the past year: StatsCan, I am reminded that one of the things driving up the cost of housing is investors, which makes it hard for the less well off to afford homes.  The fact that the NSLC has seen a 55% increase in thefts compared to last year tells me also that people are struggling financially in my home province.

Speaking of Maritime crime of a different kind, Bell says a subsea cable from Cape Breton to Newfoundland was deliberately cut — twice. This is the type of Maritime crime story that can only occur in that part of Canada: Father and son face charges in southwest N.S. lobster-buying intimidation case.

I found this story made me laugh and also shake my head: Changes to Glace Bay street will create more downtown parking, says councillor. There is a massive free parking lot behind the shops in downtown Glace Bay. The fact that some people think somehow that street parking will somehow cause people to suddenly shop more is bonkers to me.

In better news, this great maritime TV show has just celebrated 60 Years of being on the air. Yes, I speak of Land & Sea. I love that show.

The great Nova Scotia artist Tom Forrestall died recently at age 88. R.I.P, Tom.

Finally, this was a story about Cape Breton I did not know about: When Japanese vehicles were assembled in Cape Breton.

Raiding the Beaton Institute archives for my past

If you have an interest in Cape Breton, you owe it to yourself to check out the The Beaton Institute’s website. It is filled with great images of Cape Breton. That’s what I was doing earlier this year.

One of the things I found there that reminded me of my life in Glace Bay is the hospital in this picture:

I lived not too far from the Glace Bay General Hospital (above) and I used to cut through the grounds of it to get to high school or go to play hockey at the Miners Forum. I remember playing soccer with friends on the grass in the front of the hospital. I remember going to get inhalation treatments in the basement for my sinuses. It was a cool old place.


One of the jobs I had when I was younger was going into Sydney and cleaning the Nova Scotia Power Trucks (shown above). It was a cool job I did with some friends of mine. We would drive the trucks out (somewhat like this), wash them, then return them to the parking lot. It was hard work, but good and memorable.


Finally, I love this photo of Marconi in the Marconi Station in Glace Bay. Here he is making communications history!

The Combo Pizza of Venice, and other things Glace Bay and Cape Breton

When I was growing up, there were only so many varieties of pizzas. You could get a pepperoni pizza, or a mushroom pizza, or the king of all pizzas: the Combo! The combo was pepperoni, mushroom AND green peppers. In my mind it was the best pizza ever. In some ways it still is. The last time I had such a pizza was seven years ago, from one of the places legendary for it: Venice Pizzeria.

Now people from outside of Glace Bay will tell you that the Combo was not limited to my hometown, and that’s true. The one above is from Kenny’s in Sydney, N.S. It is also good! But really pizza anywhere in Cape Breton is a good thing, and if you are visiting, try and get one. Ask for a Combo.

If you feel like something else and you are in Glace Bay, I recommend the food at Colette’s restaurant. In the morning I am a big fan of their breakfast with fried bologna. It’s fantastic. And if you are there on a Thursday, you can get their corned beef and cabbage. That’s also great. A classic, in fact.

While I haven’t been back to the Island in some time, I still like to keep up with what is going on. I was sad to hear of the passing of the great Peter Politte. The Cape Breton Post remembered him here, ‘A feel for the blade’: Legendary Glace Bay skate sharpener remembered:

When local hockey players wanted to get the edge — literally — on their competition, they turned to Peter Politte. For decades, Politte was widely regarded as the best skate sharpener in Glace Bay, if not the entire island. He died Saturday at age 91.

Everyone went to him, including me as a kid. If you had fresh ice and skates sharpened by Peter, you were bound to have a great game of hockey at the Miners Forum.

In doing some research on Glace Bay, I came across these sites that wrote about mines down home, including No 2 and the Caledonia mine where my grandfather dug coal. I even found this piece on a mining disaster at Caledonia mine in 1899. More on Glace bay mining at this link.

Finally, here’s more on the combo pizza. Here’s a recipe for corned beef and cabbage from Food & Wine if you want some and can’t get to Colette’s any time soon.

Here’s a YouTube video of  Glace Bay in 1992 that brought back memories.

Finally here’s a map of all the streets of Glace Bay:

Streets of Glace Bay

I used this site to make it: Draw all roads in a city at once.

The neighborhoods of Glace Bay

According to Google Maps — and my own knowledge — the official neighborhoods of Glace Bay are:

  • Bridgeport
  • McKays Corner
  • McLeod’s Crossing
  • East Slope
  • Passchendaele
  • Steeles Hill
  • New Aberdeen
  • Hub
  • Table Head
  • Sterling
  • Caledonia
  • Morien Hill

Unofficially, there are some neighborhoods I know because of the pit they were associated with, like No 2 in New Aberdeen and No 11 in Passchendaele. If anyone thinks I should add more, please put them in the comments and I’ll include them.

Map above is a snapshot of the Google Map for Glace Bay.

P.S. I wrote this post because recently I wanted to find information on the neighborhoods of Glace Bay and I couldn’t find anything, not even at Wikipedia. The only information I could find was from the Wayback Machine with an old link to destination-ns.com and all it said was stuff like “McKays Corner is located at 46°11’12″N, 59°59’32″W in the Metro Cape Breton region of the Cape Breton Island, Cape Breton county.” or “Glace Bay is located at 46°11’49″N, 59°57’25″W in the Metro Cape Breton region of the Cape Breton Island, Cape Breton county.” (It must have been one of the earliest pages on the Internet!)

For the record, it also included information for:

  • Sterling (Subdivision 0.36 kms) is located at 46°12’00″N, 59°57’27″W
  • Hub (Subdivision 1.73 kms) is located at 46°12’44″N, 59°57’17″W
  • Caledonia (Subdivision 1.90 kms) is located at 46°10’48″N, 59°57’42″W
  • Table Head (Subdivision 2.27 kms) is located at 46°13’01″N, 59°57’10″W
  • New Aberdeen (Subdivision 2.32 kms) is located at 46°13’00″N, 59°57’59″W
  • Morien Hill (Subdivision 2.35 kms) is located at 46°10’35″N, 59°57’51″W
  • Passchendaele (Subdivision 2.83 kms) is located at 46°10’36″N, 59°58’46″W

 

 

Going to see “the lights” at Christmas

When I was young, every Christmas my family would drive around our area in Cape Breton to see “the lights”. The lights was a shorthand description for the houses that would be decorated for Christmas. Cape Bretoners were not well off, but when it came to seasonal decoration, they went all out. It was always a happy trip to slowly make our way through the many streets full of festive lighting. It filled us with the Christmas spirit.

To see what I mean, check out that video above. The local media has more on it, here: Want to see holiday lights in Nova Scotia? Our map is here to help. | SaltWire

Over the las few years in Toronto I’ve noticed people keep their lights up and on well into the winter. I like that. I like that Christmas Lights have evolved to become Winter Lights. For winter needs more light and more warmth.

 

On restaurants loved and lost of my youth (Woolworth’s in Glace Bay and Midtown in Halifax)

It doesn’t look like much in this black and white photo: just another store with an awning in downtown Glace Bay. For me though, it was the first place I got to go that was a restaurant. Inside was a food counter, and my mom (Ma) would take me there as a kid and she might get a club sandwich and I would likely get a coke float. The idea of going someplace to eat felt special to me and I learned to love that feeling from going there.

It may seem underwhelming to you as an adult, but as a kid, pulling up in one of those seats, being given a menu to choose what you want, and then having one of the ladies (it was always women) get it for you was amazing. Plus I never got to have coke floats outside of there, at least not for a long time, so that made it a special treat.

The Woolworth’s of Glace Bay is long gone. Later when I moved to Toronto there was one on Bloor near Bathurst and I used to go and get taken back home for a spell. Just like having a coke float takes me back to when I was a kid, sitting at that counter, sipping my drink with a straw, being happy.

This string of posts on restaurants loved and lost will be ending soon for me. But before I do, I wanted to mention another place of my youth: the Midtown Tavern in Halifax. It still exists, but the version I loved and lost was in downtown Halifax (see below). When I was in university, I would go there the few times I had some cash and get some draught beer and steak. The meat was thin and well done, but it was cheap, and the combo of the beef and the beer made me feel wealthy. It was unlike any other place in Halifax for students drinking beer. You could be a fool in other establishments, but act that way in the Midtown and their no nonsense waiters would toss you out on your ear. We were well behaved in the Midtown. In some ways it was a rite of passage where we learned to behave as much as anything else.

I loved both those places when I was young, just like I loved Mike’s Lunch in Glace Bay. They may have seemed like everyday places to some, but they left an indelible mark on me and think of them often, and with great affection.

All images you see are links. The top image is from Commercial Street_Glace Bay_Cape Breton_1965_Black Diamond Pharmacy_F.W. Woolworths. There’s also a great story in the piece I found the second image: Debbie Travels – Reviews and more: Midtown Tavern Halifax – End of an Era! A great story plus it has lots more photos of the Midtown.

P.S. I wanted to write about one other restaurant loved and lost from my youth: Fat Frank’s. When I was going to university I never had much money. I would constantly see the same ad for Fat Frank’s restaurant, and each time I saw it I thought: when I have money, I am going to eat there. It was my dream. For Fat Frank’s was one of the finest places to eat in all of the Maritimes.

Alas, it closed before I ever got to go. I never got to go inside nor eat any of its fine food. Even now it is elusive: I have a hard time finding images and stories of it on the Internet. The closest I can get is this 1976 review Craig Claiborne in the New York Times. And this blog has a shot of Spring Garden Road: Fat Frank’s would have been in one of those brick buildings on the right, I believe.

I never got to live the dream, but I dreamt about it for a long time…. an unrequited love, for a place now long gone.

 

 

The history of technology and telecommunications is also a history of Cape Breton


Cape Breton is known for many things, including a great deal of history. One part of that history that I wish were played up more is the part it played in telecommunications at the beginning of the 20th century. I thought of that when I read about how a Cape Breton town (North Sydney) knew about the end of WW I before the rest of North America. It knew about it because of the Western Union offices there. It was a leader at the time. Sadly that Western Union building in North Sydney was torn down.

While that place is lost, there are still other sites on the Island that recognize that history of technology. There is the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck that is worth visiting. And while it is small, The Marconi Museum in Glace Bay is also good. There are some fine museums in Cape Breton: if you are going there to there to see that sort of thing, make sure you include those two.

Cape Breton had a significant role to play in the history of world telecommunications. That role should get recognized and more museums should be made to promote that era, in my opinion.

For more on North Sydney, see:   wikipedia North Sydney Nova Scotia.

(The image above is the Marconi National Historic Site of Canada in Glace Bay, linked to at goCapeBreton.com)

On the Maritimes, Hurricane Fiona, Kate Beaton and Ann Terry, etc


The big news out east recently has been focused on Hurricane Fiona. As the local media showed, Fiona destroyed property all throughout the region. One place heavily hit was Glace Bay. A ton of damage occurred there in my hometown. Homes, buildings, you name it…even the airport between Glace Bay and Sydney was hit. To get a sense of the damage done, click on any of the links (also where the above photo comes from).

Sadly, a lot of the havoc that Fiona caused will not be covered by insurance. Here’s hoping the government steps in. And it wasn’t just damage: a woman in Port aux Basques, Nfld. was pulled out into the sea and drowned, as was this man in Lower Prospect, N.S.

Despite all this hardship, people from that part of Canada are resilient. Before the storm, the local media even had advice on how to cook when your power goes out for days: Storm day dining. Mari timers are in for some tough times, but they’ll pull through: they always do.

I’ve been thinking much about Cape Breton and Nova Scotia lately even before the storm. The great artist Kate Beaton has a new work out call Ducks which documents her life and time working in Alberta.  Anyone who is a fan of graphic novels should get it. Even if you are not, I recommend it.

Speaking of great Cape Breton women, I was thinking of Ann Terry lately. Growing up, you could hear her everywhere. She seemed like she was everywhere. Here’s a good introduction to her, and here she is broadcasting. She had a tremendous voice. A great presence, too.

In other east coast news, it looks like Westjet is suspending flights to NS . I always hate to see transportation reduced to the Maritimes. Here’s hoping that doesn’t last long. Speaking of reductions, here’s a story on how some churches are closing down in Atlantic Canada. I suspect that phenomenon is not limited to that part of the country, though.

 

On Bades Bake Shop and the Chip Wagon of Glace Bay

It can be notoriously difficult to find images of Glace Bay on the Internet. Google is no help: I had been searching for “Bades Bakery Glace Bay” and came up with nothing. It was only through searching for the specific phrase “Bades Bake Shop” did I find it.

I loved Bades as a kid. It was on my route to the hockey arena, and depending on the time and how much coin I had, I could drop in and get a doughnut or something sweet. I don’t recall there being any other such establishment nearby, so it was an oasis for someone like me who loved sweet things. I recall the lettering for the sign being yellow against a brown backdrop. It was a great place, long gone. (You can read more about it, here.)

Here’s a good piece on another place I loved as a kid and as an adult: the Chip Wagon. When I was a kid it was in the main part of town. Later as an adult I would line up like these people to get a sample of those delicious fries. I don’t know if it is still in operation. If not, that’s sad. Like Mike’s Lunch, it was a must visit whenever I went home to Glace Bay.

If you are feeling nostalgic like me, you can see lots more images of Cape Breton at Caperpics or here at the flickr account of the Beaton Institute. Forget Google: go directly to those two places.

(Images: links to images at the Beaton Institute and Caperpics).

On the wonder of Big Glace Bay Lake


There’s plenty to see and do in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, including exploring the coast. One of the best parts of that coast is Big Glace Bay Lake and the area around it. When I was younger I’d walk down to that beach and swim or or skip rocks or just sit and watch the ocean. It’s still one of my favorite things in life.

One of my favorites is now getting greater recognition. The government of Canada has designated Big Glace Bay Lake its newest National Wildlife Area. That’s great news! To see why they did, read this on canada.ca.

If you are thinking of paying a visit but need tourist help, TripAdvisor has some good information.

I love Glace Bay, but it’s not for everyone. But anyone and everyone should love Glace Bay Lake. It’s a wonder.

(Image from canada.ca)

 

On restaurants loved and lost: Mike’s Lunch in Glace Bay

It doesn’t look like much. Only that Teem sign on the right tells you that this is the location of the famous Mike’s Lunch of Glace Bay. It had a good run of 109 years in various locations in my hometown before closing in 2019.  It was one of my favorite restaurants in the whole world, and it was the first place I went and dined by myself as a young man.

Back when I was young, it was located on Commercial Street in a little galley type restaurant. It had a counter in the middle where you ate, while pinball machines lined the walls behind you and the cooking was done in front of you. In the summer I would sit next to the open door and look out at the beautiful house across the street (the only house left on Commercial Street). I can remember the sunshine and the warmth and the joy of sitting there while I waited for my food. While many diners had the famous fish and chips, my meal of choice was the Club Sandwich. Toasty bread and toothpicks held together chunks of turkey, crispy bacon, lettuce and mayo. Mine was completed with hot french fries coated with gravy and ketchup and accompanied by an ice cold Coca-Cola. To this day it is still one of the best meals I ever had.

Years later Mike’s Lunch moved to a nicer space in the Sterling. The pinball machines never made the transition, but it still had a counter. It also had nice tables and booths and friendly waitresses. I never failed to go any time I visited Glace Bay, often more than once a visit. I don’t know how, but no matter how long I had been away, when I returned they always remembered me. And the club sandwiches were as good when I was 50 as they were when I was 15. No wonder we all loved it.

I miss Glace Bay for many reasons: the Chip Wagon, Venice Pizzeria, and Colette’s, to name a few great places. But of all the places I miss, I miss Mike’s Lunch the most. Thank you Mike’s Lunch for all the great meals and great times I’ve had there. I have been to many great restaurants over the years, but if I could walk through the doors of any one of them one last time, it would be yours.

Bonus: footage of Commercial St in 1988. The town changed over time, but this is how I remember it growing up. By this point Mike’s Lunch had already moved to the Sterling. Teddy’s (or as this video called it, The Greasy Spoon, and a similar restaurant to Mike’s) was still there.

What I learned writing web scrapers last week


I started writing web scrapers last week. If you don’t know, web scraper code can read web pages on the Internet and pull information from them.

I have to thank the Ontario Minister of Health for prompting me to do this. The Minister used to share COVID-19 information on twitter, but then chose recently to no longer do that. You can come to your own conclusions as to why she stopped. As for me, I was irritated by the move. Enough so that I decided to get the information and publish it myself.

Fortunately I had two things to start with. One, this great book: Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. There is a chapter in there on how to scrape web pages using Python and something called Beautiful Soup. Two, I had the minister’s own web site: https://covid-19.ontario.ca/. It had the data I wanted right there! I wrote a little program called covid.py to scrape the data from the page and put it all on one line of output which I share on twitter every day.

Emboldened by my success, I decided to write more code like this. The challenge is finding a web page where the data is clearly marked by some standard HTML. For example, the COVID data I wanted is associated with paragraph HTML tag and it has a class label of  covid-data-block__title and covid-data-block__data. Easy.

My next bit of code was obit.py: this program scrapes the SaltWire web site (Cape Breton Post) for obituaries listed there, and writes it out into HTML. Hey, it’s weird, but again the web pages are easy to scrape. And  it’s an easy way to read my hometown’s obits to see if any of my family or friends have died. Like the Covid data, the obit’s were associated with some html, this time it was a div statement of class sw-obit-list__item. Bingo, I had my ID to get the data.

My last bit of code was somewhat different. The web page I was scraping was on the web but instead of HTML it was a CSV file. In this case I wrote a program called icu.sh to get the latest ICU information on the province of Ontario. (I am concerned Covid is going to come roaring back and the ICUs will fill up again.) ICU.sh runs a curl command and in conjunction with the tail command gets the latest ICU data from an online CSV file. ICU.sh then calls a python program to parse that CSV data and get the ICU information I want.

I learned several lessons from writing this code. First, when it comes to scraping HTML, it’s necessary that the page is well formed and consistent. In the past I tried scraping complex web pages that were not and I failed. With the COVID data and the obituary data,  those pages were that way and I succeeded. Second, not all scraping is going to be from HTML pages: sometimes there will be CSV or other files. Be prepared to deal with the format you are given. Third, once you have the data, decide how you want to publish / present it. For the COVID and ICU data, I present them in a simple manner on twitter. Just the facts, but facts I want to share. For the obit data, that is just fun and for myself. For that, I spit it into a temporary HTML file and open it in a browser to review.

If you want to see the code I wrote, you can go to my repo in Github. Feel free to fork the code and make something of your own. If you want to see some data you might want to play with, Toronto has an open data site, here. Good luck!

 

On the things parents tell their kids and the things kids remember

Vihos Sweets

This is a picture of a street in downtown Glace Bay. Next to the Dominion is a small place called Vihos Sweets. It didn’t exist when I was growing up, but it did when my mom was a teen. She worked there for a time, and she occasionally talked about it.

Though she didn’t talk about it a lot, it stuck in my mind and I often thought about it. I don’t know why. Maybe I liked the sound of it. Maybe the way she described it made it seem special. Perhaps I was trying to imagine having my own job someday. I am not sure.

I wonder of the many things I’ve told my kids what they remember. You hope that the big lessons you try and impart to your kids are the things that stick. But often times it is the little things. Things like the name of a place you worked at for a short time when you were younger.

Try and be comfortable with the notion that  you have less control than you think.  You can only live and speak as best as you can, and hope that is enough to send them in the right direction. They may recall the important things you passed on. They may recall something you said in passing. They are their own person, and they will absorb and recall what they need.

(Image via http://capermemories.blogspot.com/)

 

Four good pieces on my hometown, Glace Bay

Anyone with an interest in Glace Bay will find these worth reading:

  1. A COAL TOWN FIGHTS FOR ITS LIFE | Maclean’s | MARCH 15 1954: this was fascinating. A story from Maclean’s Magazine in the 1950s that documented Glace Bay at the crossroads. So much in this piece explains my home town and the people who lived there.
  2. Glace Bay hockey rink’s new name closer to its roots | CBC.ca: a mainstay of Glace Bay is the hockey rink. When I was a kid I lived about 100 meters from it. I spent most of my early days (until grade 10) going to it. So many memories back then revolved around that building.
  3. KEN MACDONALD: Remembering the miners | Local-Lifestyles | Lifestyles | Cape Breton Post: a good piece from the local paper on the mines of Glace Bay and the miners who lived and sometimes died in them.
  4. Miners’ houses: Lawren Harris in Glace Bay – Nova Scotia Advocate: finally this piece on Glace Bay with a focus on a famous painting of Glace Bay by Lawren Harris (shown above). It used to be in the AGO and I often paused to reflect on it, and my hometown. Just like I am doing now.