Most of the North End is two and three storey wooden houses with bay windows and front steps straight onto the sidewalk. They are painted in flat colours. The ground falls east toward the harbour, so the cross streets are steep and the water shows at the end of many of them.
The part of it north of is newer. The Halifax Explosion on 6 December 1917 razed that ground, and a new grid was laid over the old street pattern. at Russell and Gottingen lost its 1866 wooden building that day and reopened in brick in 1920.
On part of that ground the Halifax Relief Commission built the Hydrostone. It is an English style garden suburb one block deep and ten blocks wide. The houses are in terraces facing wide grass courts, with service lanes behind them. The walls are the concrete block it is named after and the roofs are slate, both chosen because the wooden houses the blast did not flatten had come down on their stoves and burned. The shops are in one row along Young Street in the same Tudor Revival as the houses.
South of that line the older houses are still standing. 5516 went up in 1895. It is wood shingled and stands on the property line with no setback at all. Most of its neighbours on that block are the same.
The shops and bars are on and . and the take up the waterfront, and grey hulls are visible from the streets above.
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