Edmonton will soon have a new suburban neighbourhood to honour Victoria's Brian Paisley, founder of the Edmonton International Fringe Festival.
The Paisley neighbourhood, proposed for the southwest Heritage Valley area, is expected to one day be home to 3,000 people and is one in a series of communities being named to recognize influential Edmontonians.
Other neighbourhoods in Heritage Valley have recently been named after Rosetta Graydon, who founded the Edmonton Humane Society, and Terry Cavanagh, a long-serving councillor and the first Edmonton-born mayor.
Paisley founded the Edmonton Fringe and ran it for 10 years before moving to Victoria.
When he got an email alerting him to the honour, Paisley said he called the city to check that it wasn't a hoax. "Come on, I'm not dead yet," he told city officials.
"I hardly deserve it," he said. "But now when I walk by, they can say, 'There goes the neighbourhood.' "
Friends expected Paisley to laugh.
"Brian would be honoured and slightly baffled," said David Cheoros, who has two Fringe plays this year. "I always had the impression he saw himself as a rebel struggling with the establishment. That's why he enjoyed the Fringe, because it's slightly organized chaos."
"Brian has this booming laugh," said Cheoros. "I can picture him."
Edmonton's Fringe Festival has run for 31 years, with the latest version wrapping up this weekend.
Naming co-ordinator Cory Sousa said the committee is working from a list of 100 Edmontonians of the Century, compiled in part by the Edmonton Journal. The developer Brookfield Residential selected the name Paisley from a short list. The land is south of Ellerslie Road and east of 141st Street.
The first Edmonton Fringe was created with a $50,000 grant. It had five venues and 45 plays but attracted a crowd of 7,500. Paisley went on to help create fringe festivals across the country, in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Vancouver and Victoria.
