Art of masonry alive and well
Todd Goode practises an old-fashioned profession
The commuters whose route to downtown Halifax takes them through the ritzy Northwest Arm neighbourhood that includes Pryor Street have been entertained this summer by the construction of a fence.
Not a picket fence or a chain link fence, but an eye-catching iron edifice anchored by an array of stone posts, built with painstaking care by mason Todd Goode.
If Goode knows who will live in the house that will be built behind his fence, he’s not saying, and the waterfront lot is owned by a numbered company. In the mason trade, part of the job is keeping your mouth cemented shut.
“It’s kind of an unwritten rule,” he said. “You’re building something that’s meant for privacy
so you assume you’re not supposed to say too much about it. There have been some jobs that we’ve been told not to tell people whose home you’re working on. Other jobs, people are quite proud of it, so go ahead.”
The Pryor Street job is so visible and so interesting that Goode has had dozens of people get out of their cars to ask him about the fence posts he’s built.
“It’s almost to the point that it’s slowing me down,” he said. “I get a lot of kids stopping by and asking questions, which I love. We find old fossils in the rock, so we keep them and hand them out when the kids come by.”
Originally from Ontario, Goode has been in Nova Scotia for 14 years, having followed a woman here who is now his wife.
He grew up in a construction family, and his father pushed the kids to get a trade. Now a journeyman with Red Seal status, he trained in bricklaying and masonry through the Nova Scotia Community College system.
Masons are always busy, Goode said, though not always in the ways they were in the past. New home construction often doesn’t include a chimney, so much of the brickwork these days is in repairs, not in building.
“So that part of the trade is dying,” he said. “People don’t see the value in it anymore and that makes sense. It’s progress. As far as doing (fence) posts and things like that, it’s much more decorative and more about the appearance of it and getting it right. A chimney can lean a little and no one will notice.”
At 41, Goode is part of an under-represented generation in his trade.
He works with older guys and younger guys, but not many his own age. One thing about the profession that appeals to him is that the work is tangible.
“I think it’s the idea that you’ve built something that’s probably going to be there after you’ve retired, maybe after you’re dead,” he said. “I want to build something that people will appreciate. That’s all that matters to me. If the customer is happy, then I’m happy, I’m not doing it for compliments. I’ve got a little wall downstairs that I built and it’s absolutely horrendous, but my wife loves it, so it stays.”