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CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
Parker's Corner honours mother and son's legacy of acceptance and authenticity in Saint John
Parker Cogswell spent his life bringing people together, right until the end. Parker Cogswell A photo of Parker Cogswell. (Courtesy: Fundy Funeral Home) When the well-known Saint Johner and longtime LGBTQ+ advocate was diagnosed with cancer, he found solace by sitting outside his home on the corner of Carmarthen and Mecklenburg Streets in uptown Saint John. 'We started sitting here when Parker was deeply into the chemotherapy,' said André Gallant, Parker's husband. 'When we were at our lowest, I remember Parker had stopped talking. And if you knew Parker, you never thought he'd stop talking. But he wasn't talking anymore.' 'But in the evening at six o'clock, if it was sunny, he'd say 'are we going on the corner tonight?' And we would come to the corner, and slowly neighbours and friends would join us. That's what we had to look forward to until his time was done with us.' André Gallant André Gallant, the husband of Parker Cogswell, speaks at the official dedication of Parker's Corner in Saint John, N.B. on Aug. 16, 2025. (Nick Moore/CTV Atlantic) Cogswell died in 2020, with a legacy already cemented around community-building and authenticity. The corner became a shrine for Cogswell following his death and soon became the uptown's most colourfully decorated street corner. Now, Parker's Corner is an official city landmark. 'He would be so proud of this,' said André, at its official dedication on Saturday, joking that Parker would've likely chosen a bigger street sign. Parker came out in the early 1980s, when visibility in Saint John's gay community was low and homophobia was widespread. 'Values and traits passed down from his mother are what gave him the strength to come out,' said Arlo Cogswell, Parker's nephew. 'Parker and Judith were very much the same person.' The dedication was just as much about Judith Meinert-Thomas, a local legend herself. Judith co-founded the Saint John chapter of PFLAG, and helped to organize the city's first Pride parade in 2003. Judith Meinert-Thomas A photo of Judith Meinert-Thomas (Courtesy: Brenan's Funeral Home) 'To me, Judith is always the parade marshal no matter what year it is,' said Alex Saunders, president of Saint John Pride. Judith died in 2022, and is remembered by her husband as a champion for diversity, inclusion and equality. 'Together, Parker and Judith helped to shape a Saint John that embraces all people,' said Ralph Thomas, Judith's husband. Saint John city hall announced the official designation of Parker's Corner in March 2024, scheduling the official dedication for this year's Pride Week in Saint John. 'This is much more than just a sign on a street,' said Kelly Bayne, the city's arts and culture coordinator. 'It is a way to preserve our local memory of this outstanding family's legacy.' For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
ADVERTISEMENT Milestones Milestones - Aug. 17 and 18, 2025 See which Maritimers are celebrating a birthday or anniversary on Aug. 17 and 18, 2025.
Milestones See which Maritimers are celebrating a birthday or anniversary on Aug. 17 and 18, 2025.
Globe and Mail
3 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
A new way of looking at architecture as museum puts on first exhibit
You can be forgiven if you've never heard of the Canadian Museum of Architecture. Not to be confused with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal – the scholarly behemoth founded by Phyllis Lambert in 1979 – the CMA is so new to the scene, its first exhibit, Architecture in Three Dimensions at Todmorden Mills (67 Pottery Rd.) has been put on display at the quaint, tucked-into-the-trees city-owned museum. The show, which closes on August 24, 2025, takes visitors on an architectural world tour utilizing models of various scales, beginning with a 1:200 version of the Roman aqueduct in Nîmes, France. But rather than showing it as it looks today, it depicts tiny workers chipping away at limestone blocks, assembled scaffolding, ladders, and hand winches/rope pulleys as the bridge rose in the first century. 'So, the arches here, those are printed in resin,' says CMA model-builder Jo Vincent-Evans. 'These brown wood pieces and latticework was all printed in plastic and then repainted to look like wood; the landscape is developed by us … these are real rocks.' While interesting for its meticulous detail, it's also a wise choice to begin a conversation about the importance of architecture, which is one of the CMA's mandates. This is confirmed with the next model, which takes a hypothetical southern Ontario landscape and presents it in two ways: untouched, and how (European) settlement/industrialization creates change, usually negative, vis-à-vis the creation of factories that produce greenhouse gases, the redirection of (now polluted) waterways, farm monoculture, fragmentation of the landscape and ecosystem loss due to suburbia, and so forth. The next model challenges gallery-goers to consider the life cycle of a typical 10-storey condominium building, from the manufacture of its various components (much of it concrete), its useful life, all the way to demolition or refurbishment. 'The building exists for [an average of] about 57 years,' says Ms. Vincent-Evans. 'And each of these [cycles] has a small graph explaining how much energy is used … the vast majority is used during the building's operation.' To avoid becoming too preachy, the exhibit takes a detour to the evolution of wood in construction via brush huts near the Sea of Galilee from 23,000 years ago–which may or may not be the beginning of architecture–to the hammerbeam ceiling at Westminster Hall (England, 1393) and, finally, to today's engineered wood products. The same is done for brick, tracing the oldest mudbricks from 11,000 BCE in Türkiye to St. Anne's Church in Lithuania (1500) and Grundtvig's Church in Denmark (1940). Stone's evolution is depicted as well, with a model of the Lower Temple of Unas in Egypt and a fun little row of tiny columns to help gallery-goers identify the differences between Doric, Ionic, the Roman versions, and the thin cast iron columns that held up Victorian buildings. To keep folks guessing (and learning), there are models of typical saltbox houses, the rowhouses of St. John's, Nfld. Known as 'Jellybean row,' the sustainably-overachieving Bullitt Center in Seattle (2013), and Toronto City Hall (1965) and Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut (1955) to represent Modernism. The exhibit also deals with the 'failure' of Modernism by discussing the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, which was so hated it was demolished in 1976 after only 21 years of service. There is also the Comfort for All model, a transparent tower showing the guts of a typical high-rise building: plumbing, electrical, chillers, boilers, sprinkler systems, natural gas lines, and wastewater handling. There are 18 models on display, but these, says Ms. Vincent-Evans, represent 'just a taste' of what the CMA hopes to exhibit when they achieve their ultimate goal of a permanent bricks-and-mortar location; with limited funding and a small staff, however, when the CMA will be able to welcome visitors year-round is anyone's guess. Founded by (and mostly funded by) retired University of Toronto faculty of medicine professor Peter Bruecker in 2015, the CMA has thus far kept a low profile as its handful of researchers and model-builders have toiled away, awaiting their moment to unleash the fruits of their labour on a (hopefully) willing public. And while there are precious few days left to see this particular exhibit (and for that this writer apologizes), it's worth keeping the CMA in mind. While Architecture in Three Dimensions is a little rough around the edges for a few reasons–it seems cobbled together quickly with no real focus other than 'architecture is important and interesting' and some of the interpretive signage didn't glue down properly–the models are worthy of consideration and praise. Perhaps, however, future exhibits could play with scale even more and allow attendees to enter full-size room mock-ups or strap on VR goggles to experience architecture in other ways. If not, there is the real possibility a visitor who tours Little Canada – that purely entertaining collection of miniature buildings at 10 Dundas St. E. – and the CMA in the same week might confuse the two in their memory. That said, there are so few places to engage in architectural discourse in this city, any newcomer, fledgling or not, is more than welcome. 'Peter [Bruecker] does not fit into any normal slot in the world of architecture,' wrote University of Toronto professor emeritus and former dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in an e-mail. 'He marches to some unknown drummer 'out there' on his own. But when I look at the CMA's freshly completed, highly realistic, colourful model of three vernacular row houses in Newfoundland … I'm enthralled.'
