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.