I heard that city planners have a theory about one of the requirements for a successful park or neighborhood, and it’s this: you have to have more than one reason for more than one sort of person to want to go there. If you build a little neighborhood park centered around a softball field, you’ll see athletes there, sure. But most of the day and much of the year nobody will be there playing ball. But add a splashy fountain for kids to run through, and a spigot that fills a water dish at dog snout level, and why not?, give out permits for a couple of food trucks to come by on Friday nights, and now you’ll see the park start to fulfill its potential. Parents and grandparents will bring little ones, and puppies, too. If there are sidewalks, families and people on dates will stroll through the neighborhood to try out the food trucks. Add benches and shade, and even in quiet times, somebody will be reading there with their pup. Property values will go up. People will paint their houses more often because they see how nice it is to live somewhere nice. It’s a snowball effect, according to the theory.
But we Midwesterners tend to leave that work to city planners, and maybe it gets done and maybe it doesn’t. The New Yorker magazine’s humorist David Sipress published a cartoon of a person watching television, where the announcer is saying: “Today’s top story: nobody did anything about anything that you wanted them to do something about.” But people around here do get off their sofas and dream up ways to bring new life to their neighborhood or the whole town. Years ago on a family driving vacation, we stopped by chance at a motel whose owners theorized that many things in life could be improved with a hearty infusion of art. Sculptures stood out front of their motel and paintings and photos hung in the lobby and hallways and all the rooms. And the owners also nudged their town into having a chalk art street painting festival, and for a few days their town of about a 1000 residents was the hippest, most art-filled place in the province of Ontario.
Admiring that spirit, last week my spouse and I walked across part of South Bend to visit the mural artists who were here creating new murals as part of the first Mural Mania festival. Nearest to our house, up on a short ladder, one painter had made good progress on a two-part mural behind the Cloud Walking coffee shop, bakery, and chocolate shop. A child, face full of wonder, looked upward at a green jar where fireflies glowed against the dusky sky. Over by Howard Park, there were two murals, one a cornucopia of flowers and butterflies, and the other a person holding flowers up for passing pedestrians and motorists to see. And on a tall section of the south wall of the Civic Theater, against a matte black background, a huge lantern glowed, but more than that: this lantern was a prism of faces and lightning bug and yellow light.
We saw some of the artists at work, and thanked them and took snapshots. Now those neighborhoods have beautiful, spirited new works of street art, big works that delight the eye and make those parts of town even more of a destination than they already were. One of those murals is across the parking lot from an ice cream shop. Another is a one minute walk from a great cheese and pressed sandwich shop. Another is not far from one of those run-the-kids-through-the-fountain spots. And one shines like a beacon from a center for regional theater. Petal by petal, wing by wing, glowing facet by glowing facet, people build up the community. And if it makes city planners feel good about their theory, well, that’s just a bonus.
Music: "Wrong Foot Forward" by Flook
