Community Mural To Bring Neighborhood Together

The Happy Valley Community Crossroads project, a neighborhood collaboration based on painting an intersection wide mural at Harris and 22^nd in Happy Valley, has been granted Bellingham’s approval for a paint day in early 2014.

The project is headed by Aaron Walters and Daniel Tucker, both members of the Happy Valley Neighborhood Association. They have been running monthly meetings for the project since early 2013.

“It link up with a lot of other issues,” Tucker said. “Pedestrian safety is something that comes up on a regular basis at the neighborhood association meetings. Everyone has that story about a near miss accident with a car.”

The goal behind the mural is to not just to make the intersection more eye-catching to potential speeders and reckless drivers, but to create a community effort that the neighborhood can really be proud of, Tucker said.

“[It’s about] creating a way for people to do something in the neighborhood that’s fun and interesting,” he said. “You probably have some really interesting neighbors you haven’t even met, [this is] about community building.” 

Intersection repair is the term regularly used for this type of project, he said, which can stretch out to include renovating other areas in the neighborhood, including adding gazebos, benches and more.

While not all community members have been following the project since its inception, one such Jim Cozad is still aware of the neighborhood’s sometimes packed streets.

“We have all kinds of places that don’t even have sidewalks,” Cozad said. “But one of the things that is nice about a small community is that we have that strong neighborhood association.”

Happy Valley continues to gain new interest from community members from around Bellingham, such as Dave Schmalz, who has been living in Bellingham for 33 years.

Schmalz has lived in Happy Valley for only five year comparatively, but already is looking forward to what street art can do for the community, he said.

“It’s a great way to bring the neighborhood together with new ideas,” he said.

Funding Walters came upon from a community work grant is going to cover most of the budget for the mural, Tucker said.

 The physical painting work will involve the community playing a larger role, coming together in a neighborhood wide painting and block party, he said. Once painted, the intersection wide mural will serve as a permanent fixture to the neighborhood.

“Even if there’s no stop sign, if there’s this huge colorful painting in the street, cars will slow down and check out their surroundings before they drive through it,” he said.

The mural’s design was chosen from a contest held for elementary schoolers in the area. The winning design was by Willow Hughes, a 6^th grader from Fairhaven Middle School.

Tucker went around the neighborhood and collected signatures to approve the design, bringing in neighbors and community members that otherwise might not have even been aware of the project, he said.

A community art project should reflect the community it comes from, and be a collaboration of efforts that reflects its own environment, he said.

“There’s already a lot of public art projects like things downtown, where city government spends money on a big sculpture, and it just gets airdropped as it were, with no real connection to the community or no real meaning or involvement for people who live there,” Tucker said. “It’s just some artist who made this giant piece of stainless steel that apparently has some significance.”

Tucker has experienced painting murals before but takes on the Community Crossroads as his first community wide effort. He looks forward to tackling community based art and says the project is only the beginning for a larger center in Happy Valley.

The project entered its first stages of planting in January of 2013, when both heads of the project had seen similar projects online, deciding to take up creating one in their own home, Happy Valley.

Walters also manages a blog pertaining to the project, with updates whenever the project climbs over another hurdle, found at Happy Valley Community Crossroads on Blogger.

Blogging Valley 3

The Happy Valley Neighborhood Association snagged a win recently, as one of the 2013 recipients of the local Peace Builder award.

The award, handled by the Whatcom Dispute Resolution Center, goes out to various bodies, persons and organizations in the county who serve wellbeing in various ways, from public servants to community members.

The association won with its last South Side Community Meal, which gathered over 100 community members in a social gathering to unite the community.

Award recipients, along with members of the community for a price, will gather on Nov. 15 at the Bellingham Cruise Terminal for the awards’ official gala.

The gala will be a night of recognition and celebration, holding a silent auction, live music, youth poetry and more, with the 11^th annual event.

The Dispute Center holds Whatcom County to values such as empowerment and integrity, as it uses such and others to bring collaboration together in order to serve the county.

One of the organizations main goals is to give community members the tools they need to deal with conflict, a goal reflected in this celebration of a community serving community.

Blogging Valley

Application for the Repurposing Larrabee Think Tank committee ended on Nov. 1, and the group will soon start discussion of what to do with the Larrabee Elementary building after it closes in June of 2014.

Once members for the think tank are picked, the first in a series of meetings will be held on the Nov. 24.

The cast of the committee contains neighborhood representatives, school representatives, a  Bellingham official and more.

The main purpose of the committee will be to generate ideas and hear feedback for potential re-purposing and re-populating ideas concerning the building’s potential future uses.

The meetings will start with establishing the proceedings for future meetings, in order to create an effective schedule once the time starts to tick down.

Ultimately the committee will serve as advisement to the superintendent, who will be in contact with the group as a way to make an informed decision.

The initial six meetings will culminate with a presentation to the superintendent, for consideration with the rest of various district staff.

Maintenance and security will be discussed in terms of keeping the building maintained, since it is predicted that the building will take a while before it is properly renovated.

Performing Arts Center And Coffee House To Pursue Longevity For Community's Sake

In a corner of the Happy Valley Neighborhood, there is one fire station where the flames inside are not only accepted, but required. For the safety of everyone inside, that fire is confined to an oven, baking goods for customers to enjoy.

A hub for community members, The Firehouse Performing Arts Center also homes The Firehouse Café. 

First renovated from the Historic 1927 Fire Station almost 10 years ago, it remains a rentable public space for performers and classes of all types.

The manager of the family owned businesses, Matt Christman, currently looks for a way to secure the fire station’s future. With the primary holders of the estate getting older, Christman aims to find an entity that would be willing to purchase the fire station and lease it back to management. This was in order to keep ownership of the building from falling into limbo and instead cement a future, he said.

An attempt to register the business as a nonprofit is one of the ways Christman wants to continue making the performing arts center as affordably public for the community as possible, the center which has held everything from high school plays to yoga classes.

“The clock is ticking,” Christman said. “In creating a quality space at a reasonable price, in an effort to keep from having to rent it for too much, we installed business such as The Firehouse Café [to] generate revenue that helps offset the costs of renting it to the artists.”

The Firehouse was the first major community center to start up in Happy Valley in years, and community members such as Harold Niven, who lives across the street from the fire station, remember what happened when the building was renovated and the café came to town. Things shifted, and The Firehouse brought a new vitality to the area, Niven said.

“It’s a great gathering spot for all kinds of people,” he said. “There are little kids who are 4 and 5 [years old]; they’ve been coming since they were babies. Matriarchs and patriarchs, it’s a second home. It’s very, very special.”

The performance space is located adjacent to the café, available for customers to observe a performance or class when taking a break from their routines. The space itself was built up from the room that used to house the fire engines themselves.

During regular hours, the baristas are at work in the café baking and taking the orders of customers sitting down to enjoy their drinks, or stopping by the takeout window for a faster fix.

The Firehouse Café beckons back to the origin of coffee houses as a people’s center, community member Wayne Hagan said, who has rented the performing place before.

“The history of coffee houses is not about coffee,” Hagan said. “Before Starbucks, it was more about communication between people, and that tends to happen here more than any coffee house I’ve ever been to.”

The café can find people meeting on a coffee date, watching ballet dancers rehearse their next piece, or looking through an art book chronicling the history of the fire station, which dates back to the 1920s. People sit one or more at a table, occasionally venturing over to another to start up a conversation.

“I’ve seen people actually invite others into conversations, just strangers,” Hagan said. “Maybe it’s the hearth. How many fire stations have a real fireplace?”

The range of people at the café goes from customers right across the street, to long distance commuters, Hagan said.

 “The key is that it does operate on a community level,” he said. “It’s not just a place for people to land with their laptops. The diversity here is amazing; all sorts of people come here.”

Hagan and Niven have both lived in Bellingham since the 1980s, and have watched the fire station grow into The Firehouse it is today. Both of them said that many people like themselves have come to rely on the center, and Niven hopes that it will be around long after he’s gone.

The Firehouse Performing Arts Center is located at 1314 Harris Ave. in the Historic 1927 Fire Station in Fairhaven, on the corners of Fairhaven, the Happy Valley Neighborhood and the South Hill Neighborhood. 

Blogging Valley 1

Happy Valley neighbors and workers alike gathered recently for the monthly Southside Community Meal, with numbers of over 100 people sharing stories, eating free food and just catching up.

The event served as a warm-up for the upcoming Happy Valley Neighborhood Association board meeting, which will cover regular neighborhood events as well as continue to discuss various council candidates, city, school and otherwise.

Local candidates for City Council and the school board spoke to address the community at the dinner, as a way to both make a connection with the people and secure potential votes.

Neighbors and speakers discussed a few hot topics from all around the large community, from the ongoing coal pollution controversy, to its opposite, the continuing work being done on bringing up the Happy Valley Community Crossroads.

The Community Crossroads project aims at creating a street mural in the neighborhood as a way to bring the community together.

The project has been in talks for a while, and aims to start painting the mural the project revolves around sometime in spring of 2014.

Introductions.

With the continual domination of major news sites and twitter feeds updating to the very second, news has come to have countless definitions. On this site, Reed Strong will be covering Bellingham's Happy Valley neighborhood with a combination of traditional news stories as well as blog posts, in an effort to create an effectively driven beat with a professional output.