FROM THE SOUTHEAST SIDE OF SEATTLE comes uplifting evidence for the important roles that a clear community vision and a vivid sense of imagination play in improving neighborhood life. The Columbia City district was founded in the 1890s as a new suburb around a rail station and was later absorbed into fast-growing Seattle. Although rundown, the neighborhood had a distinctive historic character which boosted community-led efforts in the 1990s to revitalize the area. But one half-block stretch of its downtown proved stubbornly resistant to change. Even while substantial improvements were being made throughout this working-class and ethnic community, merchants could not be persuaded to open up businesses in these particular buildings. The shop windows remained boarded up, giving the neighborhood a blighted look despite all the progress. “The buildings had been empty for twenty years,” notes Jim Diers, a local resident who at the time headed up Seattle’s innovative Department of Neighborhoods. Finally at one local meeting, he recounts in his compelling book Neighborhood Power, “someone suggested that if the community couldn’t attract real businesses, they could at least pretend.” And that’s exactly what Columbia City residents did. Working with artists from the Southeast Seattle Arts Council they painted the communities’ dreams upon the plywood covering the windows: an ice cream parlor, a toy store, a dance studio, a bookshop, and a hat shop. “The murals looked so realistic that passing motorists sometimes stopped to shop,” Diers writes. “The murals also captured the imagination of a developer and several business owners. Within a year, everyone of the murals had to be removed because real businesses wanted to locate there.” COLUMBIA CITY SAW ITS DREAMS COME TRUE in the form of a new Italian deli, a brewpub and a cooperative art gallery, which itself grew out of a town meeting in which local where local residents offered visions for the neighborhood. Resources: Neighborhood Power: Building Community the Seattle Way by Jim Diers (University of Washington Press) - See more at: onthecommons.org/magazine/16-ways-make-your-neighborhood-safer-greener-and-more-fun#sthash.VqK54FPj.dpuf
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 14:41:04 +0000
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