Mythology
Local lore suggests that the top two floors of the building were designed to contain a swimming pool; however, the pool was never completed. Again, local lore suggests that engineers and architects never took into account the weight of water in the pool, so it was unable to be filled. The top-floor swimming pool is one of the more popular myths about Fenwick Tower. In fact, after taking over the project, Dalhousie decided that the cost of installing repeater pumps throughout the building to pump the water to the top would be prohibitively expensive, and scrapped the idea of the pool before construction reached that phase.
Other myths about Fenwick Tower include:
-
- that not all the bedrooms have windows
- that the top two floors suffered extensive damage in a 1994 fire
- that the developer committed suicide
- that the building sways so dramatically in the wind that water in the toilets sloshes (in fact, the building sways 5 inches in 80 mph wind, 3 inches less than the maximum permitted by the building code regulations in Halifax)
Read more about this topic: Fenwick Tower (Halifax)
Famous quotes containing the word mythology:
“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)