John Dunsworth Mural

On the side of the Pro Skates and Oddfellows Barbershop building at 6451 Quinpool Road, a larger-than-life portrait of John Dunsworth watches over one of Halifax's busiest walking corridors. Painted in July 2022 by North Carolina muralist Jeks One, the mural immortalizes the actor generations of Canadians know as Jim Lahey, the perpetually sozzled trailer park supervisor of Trailer Park Boys, and it has become the city's most reliably decorated piece of street art, taking gold in The Coast's Best of Halifax poll for Best Public Art or Mural in 2022 and following with silver medals in 2024 and 2026. For everything else to fill a day around it, see our things to do in Halifax guide.

Lahey, Immortalized on Quinpool

Dunsworth was, and is, beloved in Halifax: The Coast's own words when his mural won gold, and a sentiment the city has backed up at the ballot box of its readers' polls again and again. Born in Bridgewater in 1946 and raised on Nova Scotia's South Shore, he built a career as one of the province's most recognizable character actors before Trailer Park Boys, the mockumentary shot in and around Halifax, turned his Jim Lahey into a national icon of doomed authority, a man forever one drink away from either brilliance or catastrophe. Dunsworth died in October 2017 at 71, and the outpouring that followed made clear how much of himself he had put into the city: benefits, theatre companies, young actors, and every fan who ever shouted a Lahey line at him on the street.

That is the context the mural walks in. Trailer Park Boys is more than a show here; it is a Nova Scotia export that filmed in local parks and hired local crews for two decades, and Lahey is its tragicomic heart. A visitor from outside Canada can stand on Quinpool Road, look up at the wall, and understand within one glance why this province adopted the show, and why the city gave one of its actors a portrait most mayors would envy.

The North Carolina Muralist Behind the Wall

The painting itself was completed in July 2022 by Jeks One, a North Carolina-based muralist The Coast describes with the simple authority of his craft. Writing on Instagram after the project, Jeks One called it a huge honour to paint Dunsworth in the community he was such a big part of. It is a sentence that captures the mural's odd, warm gravity: an American street artist, best known for large-scale portrait work, summoned north to render a Nova Scotian actor whose most famous character was a study in small-time failure, and treating the commission like a state occasion.

The placement is doing quiet work too. Quinpool Road is Halifax's most eclectic commercial strip, the corridor where the city's student, immigrant and old-Halifax populations all shop the same sidewalk, and the mural sits on the wall of a building that houses a skate shop and a barbershop, exactly the tenant mix that gives a neighbourhood portrait its credibility. This is not a mural in a museum district. It is on a wall people walk past daily, which is precisely why it keeps winning polls.

The Man Beyond Lahey

The Coast's 2022 citation made a point of insisting on the full person, and it is worth repeating here. Dunsworth ran as an MLA candidate in Nova Scotia's 1988 election. He beat a gambling addiction and then campaigned openly against video lottery terminals, turning his own worst years into public advocacy when VLTs were hollowing out working-class Halifax. "There are many sides to the man," The Coast wrote of the mural on Quinpool Road. The actor's public life in this city spanned political candidacy, addiction advocacy, and a Shakespeare-and-fringe theatre resume that long predated the television fame, and the mural's hold on Halifax rests on all of it, not only the liquor-soaked comedy.

That depth is why the piece wears well. Jokes fade; a portrait of a man who kept showing up for his city does not. The readers who vote in Best of Halifax are, in the main, the people Dunsworth campaigned for and alongside, and they have now put his wall on the podium three times across five years.

Three Podiums in Five Years

The mural's competitive record in The Coast's Best Public Art or Mural category has become its own storyline. In 2022, its first full year on the wall, it won gold outright. In 2024 it took silver. In 2026 it took silver again, listed by readers as "John Dunsworth on Quinpool", finishing behind the harbourfront Wave sculpture and ahead of the Quinpool Road murals as a collective bronze finisher, which means that in the most recent poll, two of the three medals hung on a single street. Few public artworks anywhere sustain that kind of neighbourhood affection across four municipal election cycles' worth of voting; in Halifax, only the Wave, the city's postcard-friendly waterfront icon, outpolled it.

The bronze finish of the Quinpool Road murals as a category entry says the rest: the corridor around the Dunsworth wall has accumulated enough street art that readers now vote for it as a destination. Start at 6451 and walk either direction and you will find the neighbourhood's walls doing what the best mural districts do: turning a commercial street into a gallery nobody has to be convinced to enter.

The Practical Details: Location, Hours & Essentials

Address & Location
6451 Quinpool Road, Halifax, on the exterior side wall of the building shared by Pro Skates and Oddfellows Barbershop, in the city's west-central corridor between the Hydrostone neighbourhood and the Halifax Common.

Viewing
Free, outdoors, and viewable at any hour: the mural faces the street and needs no ticket, tour, or business hours. Daylight gives the best photographs; the wall is large, so step back across the sidewalk for the full frame.

Getting There
Quinpool Road is a main bus corridor with frequent service from downtown; drivers will find metered street parking along the strip and side-street spots off the main drag. The walk from the Halifax Common or the Hydrostone Market takes fifteen minutes or less from either direction.

Making an Afternoon of It
The mural sits in the middle of one of the city's most walkable commercial strips: mix it with the skate shop and barbershop below it, the corridor's strip-mall eateries and bakeries, and the other murals that earned Quinpool Road its collective bronze in the 2026 poll.

Good to Know
Trailer Park Boys filmed around Nova Scotia for two decades, and Halifax still carries the show proudly: the Dunsworth wall is the easiest piece of that legacy to visit, and it photographs best in the soft light of late afternoon.

The short version: of all the public art in Halifax, this is the piece with a biography: an American portraitist, a beloved local actor with a second life as an advocate, a skate shop, and a poll-winning streak that outlasts most gallery exhibitions. Stand on the sidewalk, look up, and you get the whole story of why this city keeps voting for a man who played a drunk for a living and spent his real life trying to keep the city sober.