Knitting the Hat, Building the Chair, Making the Place

Residents involved in creative placemaking during our Better Block event in May 2014.

We had the unique opportunity to participate in the "Beyond the Building: Performing Arts and Transforming Place" webinar hosted by the National Endowment of the Arts and several leading national performing arts organizations. Now, before we go much further, we know you're going to ask what is a Main Street® organization doing participating in a national discussion like this? The answer is quite simple. While arts organizations are beginning to realize the power that comes from being rooted in a particular place, Main Street folks have been doing this work for over 35 years restoring historic downtown areas all over the country.

The Four-Point Approach emphasizes grassroots community action in four areas: Organization, Promotion, Design, and Economic Restructuring. These just happen to correspond with the four elements of real estate value: Civic, Social, Physical, and Economic. Participation of volunteers is a critical ingredient to the success of a well functioning Main Street organization.

Arts organizations have increasingly come to recognize the importance of serving their community. They would be well advised to look in to the success of the nearly 1600 Main Street programs all over the country. As Donovan Rypkema so presciently observed, "There is no more cost effective economic development program anywhere than Main Street." Long before creative placemaking came in to vogue, Main Street leaders were on the leading edge to bring new life and vitality to their communities. Today there appears to be an unprecedented opportunity for Main Street programs and arts organizations to collaborate.

That has been our experience the past few years in Middlesboro, Kentucky. We've put creative placemaking at the center of our restoration efforts. Tactical urbanism is a strategy we've employed to empower citizens to make short-term changes that lead to long-term improvement. Hundreds of volunteers have assisted in making pop-up parks, pop-up shops, and parklets. For more about this work read here and here.

Art classes are  new addition to the Makers Market.

Most recently our Makers Market has converted a vacant storefront in to a place where local artists, crafters, and food producers are able to gather and show their work. With nearly three dozen makers now represented, this market has become an important center for the civic, economic, and social life of our downtown.

For every Middlesboro there are plenty of other examples too. One of our favorites is Greensboro, Alabama. There the Pie+Lab started with the audacious plan of selling pie. Since 2006 they have generated over $15 million of profits that they've reinvested in to the community. They have also diversified and now make bikes out of bamboo, crafts and fashion pieces that are distributed to national retailers, and even gotten in to child care.

Where these creative placemaking or Main Street movements have taken off, they have had a salutary effect on their community and enhanced civic pride. Providing an invitation for local people to participate in celebrating, enhancing, and making their place better is some of the most important work being done anywhere today. Period.

Which brings us back to our headline. Stephen Sondheim in Sunday in the Park with George described the artistic process in some of the most touching and simple terms.

Finishing the hat--how you have to finish the hat.

How you watch the rest of the world from a window

while you finish the hat....
And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't wait for you know
That however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat...
Finishing a hat...
Look I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat.

- Stephen Sondheim, "Finishing the Hat," Sunday in the Park with George

In a way this is not unlike what folks in Main Street do every day. Much like an artist we "watch the rest of the world from a window" and have a creative separation or distance from the place that we serve. In the Main Street world our product is not a painting, a composition, or a hat; rather, it is transformation of the downtown that some might consider a three dimensional art object. In order to bring meaningful change about it is necessary to understand the creative process, the necessity of overcoming an often decades-long sense of loss, and to provide a new narrative that will help to bring renewed life and vitality downtown. While Main Street leaders may not be making hats like the title character George Seurat , we understand what it means to care about something intensely and how to act in a way that makes something new. Extending Sondheim's metaphor, you could view a downtown as simply being a very large hat. Or, to put it a slightly different way, restoring a downtown is like making a hat.

Building a Chair

While the webinar was ongoing, we set about a creative placemaking process right here at our Makers Market. We made a chair out of shipping pallets. This is far more than just a chair. It is something we can place on the sidewalk (also called "chair bombing"). When people sit on that chair it builds community. When painted bright colors it creates a sense of visual delight. Perhaps the clincher though is the use of salvaged materials we divert waste from landfills. Involving local folks in the making of the chair demonstrates their ability to bring change about and gives them a sense of ownership in the results.

The process begins by ripping pallets off by making a cut along the inside of a the rail. They can then be pried off and the nails removed.

From here the wood is cut to dimension.

Sanding the chair and getting ready to paint.

The finished chair.

Making the Place
Somehow we need to bridge these worlds of arts, community development, and Main Street. That is exactly what we're trying to do in Middlesboro, Kentucky. While our tactical urbanism and Makers Market are good steps in this direction, that's only the beginning. Here is what we have coming up:

• November 18, 6:30pm-8pm, Tri-State Messiah Sing Along Dress Rehearsal, First Baptist Church, 2300 Cumberland Ave. In preparation for Handel's Messiah, we'll have a dress rehearsal at First Baptist. This is your chance to get familiar with the music and be ready for the big event. Cookies and light refreshments will be provided.
• December 6, 3pm, Middlesborough Christmas Parade, along Cumberland Ave in downtown Middlesborough. The Middlesboro High School Band, marching groups, youth groups, churches, and fire companies will ring in the Christmas season. You can easily register online any time before November 25. No late registrations will be accepted.
• December 6, 7pm-8:30pm, Tri-State Messiah Sing Along, First Baptist Church, 2300 Cumberland Ave. We will ring in the Christmas season with selections from Handel’s most well-known work...featuring live musicians and local talent. The best part? The choir is comprised of... YOU! If you love to sing along, or even if you’d like to sit back and listen, we invite you and yours to join us for an evening of Hallelujah’s.

In 2015 our plans are even greater. We will seek to expand and grow our relationship with the Kentucky Arts Council through applying for a competitive grant in February 2015. This will most likely be focused on expanding our Makers Market. We're seeking to make this in to a venue for job training and entrepreneurship. Providing our makers with opportunities to bring their work to market will help to generate wealth.

The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks Home that our organization owns holds great potential. Repurposing this in to a place for artists and creative placemaking will also be high on our agenda.

Then there is our participation in the Levitt AMP [Your City] contest. Middlesboro is one of 26 communities nationally competing to hold 10 live performance events in 2015. Online voting for the competition continues through November 30. Of the top 20 vote getters, 10 will be selected by Levitt Pavilions to host concerts. Please vote to help us win this contest today!

To close, creative placemaking holds great potential to strengthen places all over. Arts and performance have a central role in creating better places since at least Ancient Greece, if not back to the paintings of Lascaux. If you want to find the cutting edge of where this work is being done, however, you'll just have to visit us in Middlesboro, Kentucky.