The Crack Cocaine of Gambling

One day soon after I moved to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, I decided to walk downtown to find a bar to watch the Super Bowl. The football game was, frankly, an excuse to begin the navigation of the social geography of my new home: what better way to meet new people and learn the lay of the land than to hoist some beers with locals watching a game?

The old warehouses, strip joints and brothels on the Dartmouth waterfront were torn down in the 1980s and replaced with government buildings whose soulless architecture underscores their lack of purpose in the evenings, after the bureaucrats drive back to the suburbs. The urban renewalists had evidently decided that lifeless municipal buildings were preferable to the bustling squalour they replaced, but Dartmouth is now neither a shining, respectable city on a hill nor a hedonistic Pottersville; rather, the only nighttime life downtown is found in a series of pathetic little gin and beer joints dotting Portland Street, sad...