Charlottetown Boulder Park in the News

Our neighbour on Queens Square, the Charlottetown Boulder Park, in the backyard of the Coles Building, quietly sat there, mostly unnoticed, for more than 50 years.

I did my part, as the son of a geologist, and fan of eccentric memorials, to shine light on it: I created a Wikipedia page, and published a brochure. But, by and large, it was just there.

That is, until the spring, when, in weird-seeming charitable giving scheme, the City of Charlottetown bought the boulder park‬ from the Confederation Centre of the Arts, for $4.8 million.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, it seems the city, perhaps, wasn’t aware that it wasn’t allowed to do whatever it wanted with the parcel of land it had just purchased:

Some Charlottetown councillors are questioning the decision to spend $4.8 million to buy Boulder Park from the Confederation Centre of the Arts, in a move that was meant to help fund the centre’s renovation efforts, given the restrictions on how the city can use it.

“To discover that city council and city administration doesn’t have the final say as to what the future usage of this property is … we should have known that information from the onset,” said Coun. Mitchell Tweel.

“You can’t make a major investment and spend taxpayer dollars at that magnitude and not know what the parameters are.”

Suddenly, the 10 boulders are in the spotlight.

In today’s edition of The Guardian, Managing Editor Jocelyn Lloyd weighed in:

In her piece, Lloyd mentions this website, and my light-shining efforts:

If anyone was holding a gathering here of any kind, they used to refer to it as the park by the memorial fountain or near the cenotaph. I’m not sure when I first saw it referred to as Boulder Park, but I suspect it was in 2018 when Charlottetown blogger Peter Rukavina – who generously shares his enthusiasm for his surroundings on ruk.ca – sought to “revivicate” the space, putting together a brochure downloadable from his blog and printed and distributed at the park.

Rukavina wrote, “The brochure extends from my summertime project to elevate the Charlottetown Boulder Park, and it happens to have come just at the right time, as the park is enjoying a renaissance, partly due the closure of Province House, partly due the presence of two food trucks on its edges, and partly due the shade offered by its towering trees in this summer’s oppressive heat.”

I suggest you take a look at his blog post and map for some history behind the park and what the eponymous boulders represent (hint: 10 boulders for 10 provinces).

I’m fairly certain that my Boulder Park advocacy found its root in the writing of Mita Williams, librarian at the University of Windsor, and advocate for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons.

In this particular case, there was, essentially, no information gathered together online about the past and present of the Boulder Park, and I’m proud to have done the work to assemble it. 

Having done so, the page can now contribute to an understanding of the park, in the context of the current issue.

I encourage you, in this spirit, to look around your own neighbourhood, find something significant that’s under-represented online, and create a page in Wikipedia about it. You will learn something in the process, and perhaps, sometime in the future, people will suddenly become interested in your thing and want to know more about it.

(Thanks to Thelma Phillips, Foxley River’s friend of the blog, and diligent newspaper reader, for the lead)