Paula Arab is a journalist and essayist from Halifax currently living in Vancouver.
Members of the author's family, with grandfather Jiddo in the middle and father kneeling at front.Supplied
A street name is more than a signpost. It marks the path of the lives lived there.
Without this history, cities have no stories. Under threat is that of my own heritage and family, who for multiple generations has lived on Lynwood Drive in Sherwood Park, Halifax. This maple-treed neighbourhood is the city’s oldest planned suburb and a showcase of mid-century urbanism.
It’s also a little-known but important thread of Halifax’s tapestry of diversity. The arc of the Lebanese community can be traced through this Lynwood Drive, which became a part of the city when Halifax annexed Sherwood Park from the county in 1969.
The problem is we aren’t the only Lynwood Drive. Multiple Lynwood Drives from neighbouring towns and cities have since been absorbed following amalgamation in the 1990s that created the supercity of Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM).
Three decades later – and after Amazon packages started being delivered to the wrong Lynwood Drive – the city now says this duplication must be addressed for safety reasons. In a short-sighted move, the municipality recommends renaming my Lynwood Drive because it has slightly fewer houses than the street chosen to keep the name. The recommendation, expected to go to a vote later this spring, will carry significant consequences – including erasing the singular role this Lynwood played in building one of the city’s most influential immigrant diasporas.
At its heart, this story illustrates all that is lost when bureaucratic decisions overlook immigrant histories embedded in a place. Apart from a few letters and the city’s directory from 1969 that lists my grandfather by his anglicized name, Charles B. Joseph, written records that tell the story of Lynwood Drive don’t exist.
So, I’m writing it down.
The writer's grandfather on his balcony overlooking Sherwood Park circa 1959 or 1960. The streets of Sherwood Park were the first planned postwar suburb near Halifax.Supplied
The first investor of Lynwood Drive was my grandfather, who started life here shovelling coal, as a poor, turn-of-the-century immigrant. Born Bishara Youssef Ramia in 1890, he fled his northern Lebanon village at the age of 16, desperate to escape an oppressive Ottoman regime and a strict father. A rebellious teen, he knew where the family’s meagre savings were hidden. One night, after a bad fight with his father, he stole the money and took off for New York.
Word spread through the small Lebanese diaspora in Halifax and the United States that the boy was on his way. When my grandfather’s ship arrived at Ellis Island, someone was there to greet him and put him on a train to Halifax, where his brother lived. Once he arrived in Nova Scotia, he changed his name to Charles B. Joseph and found work shovelling coal in a Dartmouth sugar factory. When the Halifax Explosion tore through the harbour in 1917, he rushed over the bridge to help the wounded. A good man, my grandfather – known to us as Jiddo and everyone else as Uncle Charlie – sent money back to his family for the rest of his life. But he never returned and his mother’s heart forever remained broken until her death.
My grandmother, Mary, was a trailblazer in her own right. Born in Halifax in 1904, to the first immigrants of chain migration from Diman, the same village as my grandfather, she was among the few of her generation fully bilingual in Arabic and English. Early immigrants arrived with no language, no programs and no safety net. Mary helped bridge the gap. She read and wrote letters to loved ones back in Lebanon, filled out forms, translated at doctors’ offices and comforted those experiencing hardship.
Three generations of letters, including from Lebanon, arrived at Lynwood Drive over the decades.Supplied
In her late teens, she began dating my grandfather after meeting him through the small Halifax diaspora from Diman. He gave her a Birks Art Deco diamond and they married during the Roaring Twenties.
Then the Great Depression hit. My grandparents lost three-quarters of their savings during the bank run. Out of work, Jiddo took a risk and went into business for himself, opening a dry-goods business beneath their apartment at the corner of Agricola and North streets. It paid off. Proving a wise and lucrative business, along with other smart investment decisions, the couple’s money troubles were long over.
My grandparents purchased the first two lots on Lynwood Drive. In December, 1959, in time for a new decade and year, they moved into their turquoise-blue split-level house on the corner. A self-taught carpenter and electrician, Jiddo built their dream house with his own hands. He had considered – and could have afforded – building in the posh South End, where the city’s old money lived. But he ultimately chose somewhere new, a fresh start in a place he and my grandmother could help shape and call their own. As the city’s first postwar planned suburb, the five streets of Sherwood Park’s rolling hills developed not by accident but by design, all at once, in the early 1950s. Each lot was deliberately created to maximize the views of the Bedford Basin, each street name intentionally chosen as part of a coherent answer to a specific moment in time – postwar optimism, middle-class aspiration and order after the upheaval of war.
For many years, we were the only “family of colour” on the street. Our home, which remains in the family to this day, became a hub for the Lebanese community, hosting family and newcomers, but also visiting dignitaries, presidents and religious leaders. I remember the late president Bachir Gemayel visiting in 1977, several years before his assassination. I also remember strangers showing up at our door, including one particular Christmas Eve, when a desperate family pulled my mother away to help translate at the hospital where they had a sick child.
The writer's grandfather, who changed his name to Charles B. Joseph after arriving in Nova Scotia, in his garden on Lynwood Drive. Her grandparents bought the first two lots on the street.Supplied
Mostly in the sixties, seventies and eighties, it was immigrants, many from Diman, who found guidance, translation, support and comfort on Lynwood Drive, as they built new lives in a new country. The Canadian Museum of Immigration calls my ancestral village “the tiny Lebanese village that changed the face of Halifax,” while The Globe and Mail described the Diman diaspora as “transforming the historic city of Halifax into a modern metropolis.” Back in Diman, “Lynwood Drive” was more than an address but a landing place and proof the gamble of emigration paid off.
To rename it Diman Drive, as our city councillor, Kathryn Morse, suggested, would miss the essence of what this place represents. Jiddo left Diman for Canada and a new beginning, not a monument to what he left behind. Such a name would set us apart, when what he sought – and what we became – was to be part of the Canadian story.
It would also erase the British heritage of “Lynwood,” a name with powerful poetry of place. Postwar developers favoured names that sounded natural and hopeful, reflecting the optimism of a new suburban era. “Lynn” means water – the views of the Bedford Basin – while “wood” evokes the forest that once covered Sherwood Park. This naming pattern was no accident. It was aspirational and an effort to root modern life in nature and belonging.
Jiddo's grandchildren sit in the side flower garden at the home on Lynwood Drive, including author Paula Arab at far left.Supplied
When we met with Ms. Morse, she told us it would take a “very compelling argument” to vote against staff’s recommendation, as though community memory and historical significance – something required by HRM’s street-renaming ordinance – aren’t compelling enough.
Council is elected to direct bureaucrats, not be directed by them. Bureaucracy can measure length and width but not meaning; it can rename a road, but it cannot rewrite its soul.
Every street tells a story and if we stop listening, we risk losing our way. A street name is more than a label; it’s a map of human footprints layered over time. Lynwood Drive charts Halifax’s evolution of postwar suburbs to multicultural city.
It stands as proof that cities are built not only of bricks and bylaws but of memory. Change is inevitable, but remembering is a choice.