Gather 'round the block

A neighborhood rises and falls with its social capital, its sense of community crucial to its day-to-day success as a desirable place to live, to its ability to organize against threats such as crime or unwanted development, save a struggling commercial district, or prevail in the face of natural disaster. When a community cares about itself, it shows. 

Yet a community is not created simply by proximity. It takes a movement, sometimes repeated movements, movements that, if one looks closely enough, might even resemble dancing, dancing in the streets. It matters not what one wears, just as long as one is there. 

It was an old-fashioned block party that reignited the passion in a community on the north side of Knoxville. Happy Holler had its heyday in the 1940s and 50s, and then fell into decline with dilapidated and vacant buildings, crime, and vagrancy. 

When the Evans family opened Friends Antiques and Collectibles, it was one of only four on the block, along with the Time Warp Tea Room, a scratch-and-dent furniture showroom across the street, and a small appliance repair service that had been around for 25 years.

After six months of solid sales, Rick Evans’ daughter and wife had the idea to put on a customer appreciation day. The family hit the pavement, met with the other business owners, formed a planning committee, lined up food vendors and planned out an afternoon of fun. Evans said they even contacted the City of Knoxville and attempted in vain to receive a permit to close the street.

A street closure for a party not sanctioned by the city is hard to come by in Knoxville. Officials urge residents to hold their events on private lawns, at park shelters, or other public facilities so as not to interfere with the flow of traffic and prohibit emergency vehicle access. Aside from the city’s large “official” festivals, only a handful of small block parties are given the green light to stop traffic each year.

However, the Happy Holler folks didn’t let the lack of a permit get in the way of their customer appreciation day and went ahead with their party anyway. Much to organizers’ surprise, the first Hollerpalooza drew crowds of people, effectively closing down the road anyway.

“We had over 2,000 people here on a Saturday for the first event,” Evans said.

The turnout forced the city to play catch-up and send police to the scene to do traffic and crowd control. Needless to say, the city picked up the phone to call block party organizers prior to the next year’s event asking how they could help. 

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslan, who was Knoxville’s mayor when the city denied Happy Holler’s request to close the block, even traveled from Nashville to apologize for not being more cooperative the first year, Evans said. But by then, the event had already proven itself a success. Attendance climbed to more than 3,000, then 4,000 the year after, then 5,000. Evans eventually stopped keeping track.

“We sort of quit counting because it was nothing but people,” he said.

But the block party was a success in bigger ways too. Someone bought and renovated the whole row of stores across the street from the Friends antique shops. In the past eight years, Evans said seven new businesses have moved onto the street, including a very popular bar and restaurant.

“Thursday, Friday and Saturday you can’t park within two blocks of Happy Holler,” he said. “We’re very proud of it.”

While there are tangible benefits of a street gathering, Tony Hickey, professor of sociology at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., says there’s something about a block party that is more important yet harder to recognize taking place behind the scenes—the building of social capital. The academic term is used to describe the value of interactions and relationships between neighbors and fellow citizens. Much like one needs financial capital to build a house or start a business, one needs social capital to draw community interest in a school bake sale or persuade a neighbor to loan out his or her lawnmower.

Plainly put, organizing and participating in cooperative events like block parties and other social gatherings builds community. Progressive communities recognize the concept and invest heavily in developing their social networks, Hickey said.

“They create all these occasions for people to work together to get to know each other,” he said. “It’s a clever idea as a way to sort of get people to pay attention to each other and community development occurs as a byproduct.”

A community that block parties together, sticks together.

Early Appalachia had its own kind of block parties. Though they may have been building a barn rather than purposefully building social capital, groups gathered to get something accomplished and have a little fun. Rob Ferguson, a visiting assistant professor in the history department at WCU, said Appalachian farm owners would go to great lengths to entice as much help as they could get.

“If you’re building a barn on your land, you’d invite all your neighbors, and then you’d have a bunch of food and play music,” he said.

Music was at the center of most of the early Appalachian gatherings—a phenomenon that holds true to this day as evidenced by the numerous community jam sessions held across the region. Before television, radio, computers, and other forms of diversion became household items, mountain residents jumped at the opportunity to get together to play music.

“If there were a fiddle or a banjo around, people would gravitate in that direction,” Ferguson said. “Anyone would show up.”

Instruments often were crude and homemade, he said—banjo heads were made from dried cat gut, and players used little more than waxed string to pluck a tune, or a washboard on which to scratch a rhythm, but the result was that most everyone had some kind of instrument at hand.

Like block parties gave way to more organized festivals, so musical jam sessions spawned more events like Asheville’s Rhododendron Festivals, which later became the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, first held on the 1920s.

In addition to mountain music, other Appalachian cultural icons, like moonshine, were popular at old time gatherings. When the corn harvest came in, corn-shucking parties would invite all hands to pull the husks and silks from the cob. A bottle of moonshine hidden somewhere near the bottom of the pile provided the motivation to keep shucking.

Many small towns in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee are reviving these time-honored techniques to lure local residents and passing tourists back to Main Street and local businesses. Though it appears none have gone so far as to promise bottles of moonshine, downtown and merchant organizations are throwing block parties and festivals with the promise of mountain music, good food, and a good social time.

During a time when much commercial activity is in conducted in shopping centers on the outskirts of town, cultural street festivals remind people that there is a community to be found. Such block parties and festivals have become main attractions in little towns like Waynesville, N.C., which closes down portions of its historic Main Street several times a year for various events including street dances, an international festival in July associated with the Folkmoot USA International Dance Festival, and the Church Street Arts & Crafts Festival and Apple Harvest Fest in the fall. 

In Sevierville, Tenn., the Bloomin’ Barbecue & Bluegrass Festival was created as a way to get tourists to notice what the small town—Dolly Parton’s hometown—has to offer. Though the town boasts fewer than 15,000 residents, an estimated 12 million pass through on a yearly basis, heading to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park or its neighboring sister cities of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. And what better way to get people to stay and visit than rope off a few blocks downtown and show them a good time at an Appalachian barbecue and bluegrass street party? 

Despite the tremendous influx of visitors, Sevierville still manages to keep its small town Appalachian feel.

“We call ourselves ‘your hometown in the Smokies,’” said Bob Stahlke, spokesman for the city of Sevierville. “While we’re a big town in terms of having a lot of tourists, we’re a small town in terms of the community.”

Major productions designed to attract tourist dollars typically draw support from local governments. However, a group of citizens in Franklin, N.C., called Venture Local, began organizing monthly block parties aimed at local residents last summer. While the town already puts on a whole slate of seasonal tourist events, including a fall bike ride, a bluegrass festival, a Christmas event, and more on Main Street, Venture Local’s goal was to remind Franklin’s own local population to head downtown on a more regular basis.

Matt Bateman, one of the group’s leaders, said it’s too easy for locals to hop in the car and head out of town without giving a second though.

“We’ve become so disconnected in our thinking,” he said. “Whether its heading out to Walmart to do some shopping, why not come downtown first to see what’s happening?”

The monthly events drew people downtown and thus were an incentive to keep businesses open. Yet there was an undeniable community building component that Bateman said was special to see. While most evenings downtown Franklin shuts down even before the street lights come on, Bateman said that on nights of Street Fest, Main Street came alive as people filled the street and engaged in friendly chatter. 

“With all the things going on the world, if our communities are going to survive, we’ve got to come together,” Bateman said. “If socializing on a Friday night starts it, then so be it.”

Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s, Jon Fillman remembers when it was easier to get people together. All it took for a block party to start on a slow, summer Sunday was a couple of neighbors, portable grills, and cars strategically parked at each end of the street as traffic barricades. Kickball, music, and the aroma of slow-cooked supermarket meats gave the embattled city pavement and the street’s residents a break. 

“It was very impromptu, it kind of just happened,” said Fillman, who now works for the City of Asheville. “The parents decided they would close the street and just closed it. It was kind of a different time back then.”

Things have changed over the years. Part of Fillman’s job is permitting special events, street festivals, and neighborhood block parties—and today he frowns on illegally parked cars for a block party or otherwise.

Permits help Asheville keep track of its activities. Since the mid-2000s, the city averages more than a dozen neighborhood block parties each year, though surely there are more neighborhood parties that skirt the $50 permit needed to close a street. 

Betty Sharpless has lived in a small H-shaped neighborhood on the north side of Asheville for 30 years or so. Sharpless’ home is on the neighborhood’s short connector between two, larger parallel roads. But the little road disconnected neighbors more than it connected them, Sharpless said. 

“The people on the left side didn’t know the people on the right, and I thought we should know each other,” she said. 

Trapped in the middle of strangers, Sharpless decided to take matters into her own hands. She spent $50 on a permit and went from house to house passing out flyers, assuring residents that the April 1 date was not a Fool’s Day joke. The biggest hiccup the inaugural party? Getting people to go home at the end of the night. Sharpless considers those $50 the best she ever spent.

The party’s success created a block party tradition. Sometimes multiple parties are hosted each year, as the neighborhood’s short connector road fills with sandboxes and water gun fights for the kids, and grills, beer, and bean bag toss for the adults.

While the events are great for residents’ social calendars, their impacts are most noticeable during the rest of the year. People now recognize one another’s faces, remember names, and participate more often in other neighborhood functions such as baby showers, Easter egg hunts, and Halloween trick-or-treating.

“People were living within four houses of each other and they didn’t know they lived within four houses of each other,” Sharpless said. “(The party has) helped it be much more of a community.”

While a small block party made Sharpless’ little north side neighborhood a more cohesive community, Asheville as a whole leans on much larger events in fostering its citywide community. From the Brewgrass Festival to Downtown After 5 to Shindig on the Green, there’s some sort of festival, party, or large-scale gathering happening for nearly a third of the calendar year. 

The YMI Cultural Center’s block party is recognized as one of the rising stars. The Young Men’s Institute has been a hub of African-American culture in Asheville since 1893, when George Vanderbilt financed the center’s construction for the black workers employed at the Biltmore Estate. The YMI provided night school for adults, a day school and kindergarten, Sunday School, bath facility and a library. It had a gymnasium, doctor’s office, drugstore, reading and meeting rooms, sleeping rooms and a swimming pool. 

Two years ago, the YMI Center held it’s first block party as a kick-off event to its signature Goombay festival—an African-Caribbean food, arts, and culture event held on Market and Eagle streets in downtown Asheville. The block party was a huge hit. Although the YMI Cultural Center put Goombay on hold for a year to celebrate the organization’s 120th anniversary, they brought the block party back and drew throngs of party goers. 

“The environment—it’s not inhibited by walls of a building, where you have to be really careful about ‘don’t break this, don’t knock down this,’” said Sharon West, chairwoman of the cultural center’s board of directors. “It’s a place where people want to be.”

West said the block party quickly has become a tradition that will last into the foreseeable future. When people converge from all over the city to a single block to celebrate cultural diversity and enjoy a good time together, a special moment has been created. Much like Sharpless on the north side of Asheville, West also touted the merits of a middle-of-the-street celebration.

“Every community needs to have a block party,” West said. “It brings the community together.”