Taylor Wilcox, 10, of Vancouver, works on a collaborative painting at the International Food Festival on Saturday.Photo Gallery
Residents and business owners have struggled for years to revitalize an area of central Vancouver defined by the kaleidoscopic street that bisects it: Fourth Plain Boulevard.
The four-lane thoroughfare is surrounded by a mishmash of apartment houses, supermarkets, strip-mall eateries, auto repair shops and longtime businesses offering everything from meats to megabytes. Many of the businesses, community gardens and neighborhoods reflect the fact that the area is a melting pot of new immigrants from Russia, Asia and Latin America.
Food, community activists believed, could be the thread that stitched it all together.
On Saturday, what could become the first annual Fourth Plain International Food Festival took over a grassy former school site now used for soccer and youth football. Booths represented a dozen or so restaurants in the area, along with a smattering of businesses, musicians, police and firefighter displays and in-action artwork hosted by the Clark County Murals Society.
Organizer Mark Maggiora said the festival was a departure for motorists accustomed to zooming by on Fourth Plain on their way to someplace else — a chance for people to appreciate what’s here now and consider possibilities for the future. He cited Portland’s Mississippi Street, Northwest 23rd Avenue and Macadam Avenue as examples of previously run-down areas that have turned around.
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Saturday’s festival provided a hint that the same kind of revival is possible on Fourth Plain, he said.
“The eating thing brings them here and serves as a basis for everything,” he said. “We decided, let’s create a reason for people to stop and see for themselves.”
It may not have been as glitzy as the typical summer festival at Esther Short Park. Instead, organizers said, they met their main goal by simply giving people a place to gather.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” said Sharif Burdzik, who chairs the Fourth Plain Business Coalition, which planned the festival. “I just thought: ‘We just need to do it.’”
Laurel Valdez strolled through the area with her 6-year-old grandson, Bryson. Valdez, who lives in the Orchards area, said she was intrigued by the idea of a community festival along Fourth Plain.
“It needs it,” she said.
Indeed, the corridor includes some of the lowest-income swaths of Clark County.
In 2007, the city established a task force to tackle a series of issues including public safety, housing, business vitality, walkability, physical appearance and transportation. Maggiora, who moved to the Rose Village neighborhood four years ago with his wife, Patti, heads the task force’s housing coalition.
As executive director of Americans Building Community Inc., Maggiora has brought together volunteers and skilled handymen to paint peeling houses, clean trashed properties, plant new vegetable gardens and generally rejuvenate an area beset with blight. The goal is to improve Rose Village, while also partnering with nonprofit groups to ensure working-class people aren’t shoved aside by gentrification.
The food festival on Saturday showcased that vision.
“You don’t have to be rich and famous to go out and have a good time,” Maggiora said.
