Candice Davenport is a nurse who works on improving public [...]]]>

Meet Candice!

In our Citizen Placemaker series, we chat with amazing and inspiring people from outside the architecture, planning, and government worlds (the more traditional haunts of Placemakers) whose work exemplifies how creating great places goes far beyond the physical spaces that make up our cities.

Candice Davenport is a nurse who works on improving public health in the Township of Maplewood, New Jersey, and who understands deeply the importance of place in creating healthy communities. One of her recent initiatives, the Gratitude Graffiti Project, turned dozens of storefronts along several of the town’s commercial streets into a place where neighbors could share things that they were grateful for by writing them directly on store windows. Simultaneously they collaborated with their local library system to create a library themed gratitude graffiti wall to also collect thoughts of gratitude.  The project started shortly before Hurricane Sandy last fall; after the storm, it proved to be an important part of the community’s recovery process, as it gave everyone a way to work through the storm’s aftermath together while maintaining a positive, forward-thinking outlook in a very tough time. We spoke with Candice recently about how she bridges health and place in her work.

Why it is that you are interested in Placemaking, as a public health nurse and health educator?

My background is in nursing. My mom was a nurse, and I read about Florence Nightingale and how a person’s environment affects their recovery, and how a healthy environment creates a healthy person and vice versa. The importance of where we live, work, play—that’s a big mantra of public health, and a huge mantra for nursing if you look at the person from a holistic perspective.

I have a bachelors degree in nursing from UPenn, and a masters degree in public health and community health education from NYU. I’m a first generation American; talk about place! My parents both immigrated to the US from the Philippines, became citizens, and raised me and my siblings here, so there was a very clear definition early on: this is your place. How are you going to define your place and make your mark? Those were things we grew up understanding.

And now you’re making that mark through the Gratitude Graffiti Project. What was the inspiration for that project?

I work as a nurse for the health department in my town, Maplewood. I wanted to focus on wellness at our adult health clinics, and approach it in a positive way. I met up with another mom from my kids’ school, Lucila McElroy, a wellness coach and a dharma practitioner, to brainstorm. We hadn’t met before, but we hit it off brilliantly. Right as she was about to leave, she said “You know, I’ve always wanted to do something about gratitude. We all talk about happiness, but we don’t know how to get there, and gratitude is the first step, and an easy step, to get to a place of happiness. No matter what happens around you can still always be grateful and therefore always be happy with your circumstance.”

A quick sidebar: I’m originally from Flushing, Queens, and I grew up with a lot of graffiti around me. A lot of people look at it negatively, as just tagging. From a child’s eye, I always looked at it as art. Now, as an adult, I lead a children’s group at my church, and I lead a stained glass window tour for kids, and I tell them ‘look at how the windows affect us, and how light shines through it.’ These windows are not just works of art, they were originally created as instructional pieces back when most people couldn’t read biblical text. So the use of natural light and color and graphics on windows to express something has always been inspiring to me.

So when Lucila was talking about doing something to encourage more gratitude, and doing it in a way that would reach a lot of people, I threw out using windows. I said, “We could do graffiti!” As an artist, when you have a thought that you have to get out, you have to face that inspiration and get it out of your system and physically move it. I figured, if people have these thoughts of gratitude trapped inside of them or they just have never manifested it before, why don’t we give them a way to express that, in a way that allows them to be really present, physically, in the community?

I’ve lived in Maplewood for about twelve years now, and she’s lived here for six, so it was easy for us to go into the stores that we frequent most often, talk to a store owner that we knew, and say look, you’ve got these great windows, and we’ve got this great idea, and it’s only going to be up for 40 days. Any of your patrons can write down one thing that makes them happy that they can be grateful for.

“We love Maplewood because this is the kind of community we have, where people do stuff like this.” / Photo: Gratitude Graffiti Project

Did you have to do any convincing, or were the store owners pretty receptive to your idea?

Many people were receptive. We said just let us use your window; we’ll even provide the marker. Just put up a little sign explaining that this is the Gratitude Graffiti Project, which we printed out on our printer. It was so bare-bones. We had no supplies. Everything we did, we paid for out of pocket. We didn’t mind doing it because we thought how many stores could this be, four, five? It turned out 25 stores participated. Not only did it increase foot traffic into the participating stores, it increased foot traffic around the town; most importantly, it increased the feeling of community connectedness among the stores, our libraries, and the residents. People who have watched the video have come up to us and said “We love Maplewood because this is the kind of community we have, where people do stuff like this.”

People really like the interactivity of it; you are both the artist and the spectator. Not only did everyone feel cool that someone’s reading what they wrote…everyone loves to tweet, so this is sort of like an old-school way of doing that, right? And you get to be in the present moment and write down something that you are truly grateful for, that you might not otherwise have acknowledged about your day. You walk away happier with your life. Likewise, writing on a public window allows for other people to be changed by what another person wrote. One of our store owners told me a story of a woman, whom she didn’t even know, who called her store one day. The woman was riding a bus that stopped in front of her hair salon and read what people wrote on the store windows. She called just to tell her that reading the notes of gratitude from so many people changed her perspective for the rest of the day. It’s the biggest gift that we could give to anybody, and that they can give to other people.

There was a difference between what was written before and after Hurricane Sandy. People started off writing things like I’m thankful for my kids, for my coffee, whatever. Then afterward it became I’m thankful that my house didn’t fall down, grateful for electricity, thankful for a neighbor, or I’m thankful that I can call my mom. It really put things in perspective for people. Many of us had no power for nine days, and yet we were still able to be grateful.

You’re also working on getting a walking school bus started in your town with Camilla Zelevansky (who’s been working with us at PPS on our image database).

Maplewood is a very walkable community. Tuscan Elementary School, where my kids go, was built to be a walkable school, but we’re finding that a lot of kids are driven—mine included, but we stop and walk from a couple of blocks away. I think it’s just a mindset in our culture now, to think that kids need to be dropped off right in front of school, because it’s not safe to walk. So in addition to kids having so many issues relating to obesity and lack of exercise, we’re also getting kids who are not confident in their environment. They don’t know basic place markers, they don’t know directions, they don’t know basic street crossing safety guidelines and they don’t know who their neighbors are. That’s something we need to change, because the only way you get to know your environment is by being in it, and when you’re in a car you’re not really engaging with your environment or with your own body.

When you walk, you create the opportunity for these moments where a child can dream, and learn, and notice and think about that blossoming flower that yesterday didn’t have a bloom and now does. It’s an opportunity to create wonder. I’m inspired by opportunities to create places of wonder, because every day is a gift, and every day is wonderful, but only if we engage in it. Only if we allow for the beauty of the community to come out and for us as individuals to soak it in.

Storefront windows in Maplewood village were transformed into opportunities for neighbors to share their gratitude with each other / Photo: Gratitude Graffiti Project

As a public health nurse, do you think there’s an actual effect on peoples’ health when they get involved in their communities?

We’re human beings who are, by nature, social creatures. We’ll always be that way. No matter what technology bridges communities within the online spectrum, we’ll still need to engage in sunlight, with eye contact, and touch, and smell, and with our senses. How a person looks at and thinks about their environment, subconsciously is a reflection on how an individual thinks about themselves and their health condition. A healthy community is a thriving community and people are drawn to environments where they can be productive citizens and grow; to be able to make change and to be changed for the better. This, I think, is what we as human beings all seek in a community to live in and call home.

What advice would you give to people who aren’t happy with the current state of things in their community, and are trying to change it?

One thing that both the Gratitude Graffiti Project and the walking school bus have taught me is that you can’t do it alone. You need a group of people who also believe in what you’re doing, and believe that this is true and possible. You need that momentum behind you, and that’s where the power of people comes in.

Another thing is that you actually do have to have a vision. You have to have the self worth to know that you and others like you deserve a clean and healthy environment to thrive, and deserve to be inspired by that environment. In my experience, even in the least desirable of conditions, we can still be moved by inspiration if we always have a sense of appreciation and wonder about the world around us, if we imagine the creative possibilities and if we commit to being mindful of our place. But we must be engaged and present in our relationship with our environment and surroundings if we want to be moved and take action on its behalf.

Because in the end, I believe that the relationship between a person and their environment is a symbiotic one. If the environment is a positive, healthy one, the person will grow to have the healthy belief that they have the power to change or protect their environment and be stewards of positive change in how they live their life. I suppose that is the lesson I would like to pass down to my children; so hopefully, I’m doing my part.

Sarah Ordover is the founder of the NewBo City [...]]]>

Sarah Ordover speaks at the opening of the NewBo City Market; to her right sit Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett / Photo: Sarah Ordover

In our Citizen Placemaker series, we chat with amazing and inspiring people from outside the architecture, planning, and government worlds (the more traditional haunts of Placemakers) whose work exemplifies how creating great places goes far beyond the physical spaces that make up our cities.

Sarah Ordover is the founder of the NewBo City Market, a new public market that opened October 27th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We worked with Sarah on a feasiblity and site selection plan for NewBo, and checked back in with her recently to chat about her experience with getting the market up and running, and how food is helping small towns like Cedar Rapids to re-establish a sense of place.

Why don’t we start off by talking a bit about the community of Cedar Rapids?

Well, I’m originally from New York, and my background is in marketing. I moved to Iowa in 1989 for a job, and I didn’t know a soul. My first night in Cedar Rapids was a beautiful Saturday in August, and I decided to go out and explore, looking for nightlife, someplace where people hang out. I didn’t know the first thing about the city, but there’s a riverfront, and I thought, ‘I’ll just go down to the river, there’s always something going on by the river.’

So, I started driving up and down the river looking for signs of life, and there was nothing going on. I went back to my hotel and I thought, ‘Ok, I’ll try again tomorrow.’ I spent the next couple of weeks trying to find the center of town and find where life happened. Eventually, I realized that Cedar Rapids is a wonderful community, but that it was missing a central congregating spot, the place someone like me could go to meet people and find camaraderie.

That’s a story that a lot of people are familiar with, where they’re in a town and there’s no there there, as the saying goes. What inspired you to actually get involved in changing that?

In 2008, Cedar Rapids had a big flood. Before that, there had been the beginnings of an arts district called New Bohemia along the riverfront. New Bohemia was in the very early stages of development, but then the neighborhood was wrecked by the flood. At the same time, one of the concerns that people who are interested in healthy eating, like myself, had was that there was little year-round access to healthy or specialty foods. If you wanted to get anything other than regular supermarket fare, you had to go to a food co-op in Iowa City, which is about 25 miles away.

Shortly after the flood, some girlfriends and I were having our standard conversation: “When are we going to get a Trader Joe’s? Will the New Pioneer food coop ever move to Cedar Rapids? Etc.” As a marketing person, I understood that our demographics weren’t such that we’d be at the top of anybody’s list for expansion. But Cedar Rapids did already have a fantastic farmer’s market downtown, with 150-200 vendors of all different kinds; food, arts, crafts, and 15,000-20,000 visitors each Saturday it was held.

My friends and I started talking about the downtown farmers market, and how fun that was, but that it was really needed in the middle of January when people were looking for things to do. It operates on eight Saturdays in the summer. There had been a proposal for the riverfront, River Run, that had included a year-round farmers market, and the conclusion of the conversation with these girlfriends was, “Hey, Sarah, why don’t you go see who’s working on the year-round farmers market?” I figured I’d make some phone calls, see who’s working on it, and get on whatever committee it was. Well, it turned out there was nobody working on it.

Is that something that you are prone to do? To see that something’s not happening and to just say, “You know what, no one’s running this, I’m going to step up and do it”?

Yes; I’m an entrepreneurial person. I love starting businesses, but I had never done anything like this before. I’d been on nonprofit boards, but I’d never started a nonprofit or done any fundraising. And I’d never worked with governments before. But sometimes, ignorance is the best way to go forward, because you don’t have any preconceived notions about how something should be done, or whether it can even be done or not.

“In Iowa, the idea of a Public Market is new; it’s not a museum, it’s not the symphony, it’s not a theater.” / Photo: Amber

Do you have advice for people who are interested in getting more involved in their communities, but don’t have that same entrepreneurial spirit?

One of the things I have to say that I did pretty well was learn, and listen to people. I just went to everybody I could think of for advice, help, mentoring. One person would introduce me to somebody else. A number of influencers got excited about the idea, people within the community who had clout. I, of course, had no clout. I was not a community insider. But they were able to help point me in the direction of the first few steps and use their own influence to open doors. There was a guy who was running a nonprofit that was looking at how to redevelop the New Bohemia neighborhood, who introduced me to his board, and they introduced me to people, so it just becomes this exponential power, if you’re willing to be open and make those connections.

The other thing is that I put together a board of directors that represented all of the different organizations that were necessary to be a coalition that would legitimize the idea. I find that a lot of people who are in the food movement, or who are involved with Placemaking, get very insular with who they’re talking to. As a business person, some of the first people I sought out were from our Downtown District organization, the Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitors Bureau. I understood that, if this was going to be accepted, it had to be accepted by a broad swath of the business, government, and nonprofit community, not just people within my own cohort. So the board of directors represented the chamber, the CVB, the city council and other key decision makers.

Building the coalition happened incrementally. I used third party endorsement. My strategy was that if I could get somebody from the Convention and Visitors Bureau to say yes, then I could get somebody from the Chamber to say yes, then from the Downtown District, and so on. In Iowa, the idea of a public market is new; it’s not a museum, it’s not the symphony, it’s not a theater. And I was an unknown, so building a coalition from the stakeholder community was essential to our success.

You just listed off a couple of examples of more familiar revitalization ideas, and they were all “old-school” cultural institutions. Do you see the NewBo City Market as a new kind of cultural center?

You know, when I started with this idea, I got a lot of push back that the market wouldn’t work here. New Pioneer, a food co-op from Iowa City, where the University of Iowa is based, tried opening a branch in Cedar Rapids 20 years ago, and that failed, so conventional wisdom was that we didn’t have the population to support the concept. But what folks didn’t realize about Cedar Rapids was that peoples’ consciousness about food and eating has really changed. People of every stripe are interested in food these days. You have the Food Network, and tons of cooking shows. Being a foodie is no longer only limited to those interested in organic cooking.

Food is a cross-demographic link, a common interest that does not know boundaries of age, income, gender or race. Everybody eats. Add to that the rising obesity rate in Linn County and surrounding areas, and there’s a real opportunity to create an environment where we can educate them about better eating habits, while making good food more accessible in a non-institutional way.

All slideshow images appear courtesy of David K. O’Neil.

The sun has barely risen, but the horses and delivery wagons forming a [...]]]> This slideshow charts the rise and fall of the Washington Market, from its earliest days to its destruction in 1960. Click the arrow to the right to advance to the next image.

All slideshow images appear courtesy of David K. O’Neil.

The sun has barely risen, but the horses and delivery wagons forming a steady stream from Dey to Canal Streets since nightfall have to share the road again. Rats scurry back into the maze of wooden sheds with their vegetable scraps as an early-to-rise New Yorker walks briskly down Washington Street, market bag in hand. He wants to be sure to get the day’s choicest fish, to be glimpsed jumping in their tanks. Not far behind him is a housewife, coming to the market for some young turkeys, chickens, and ducks. She places these in the basket her servant carries alongside her, next to the butter which has a separate tin cover. Soon the market is in full swing, with vendors prominently shouting out the fresh spinach and kale from New Jersey, bundles of rhubarb and asparagus from Long Island, and baskets of strawberries from the Carolinas.

Such was the scene in the Tribeca of 19^th century in downtown Manhattan. Commerce of a different sort continues in this neighborhood of the 21^st century. New Yorkers walking into the tony enclave’s restaurants, art galleries, Duane Reades, and Starbucks cafes, who today look up and see One World Trade Center rising overhead, are probably unaware that an enormous food hub called Washington Market used to make its home here.

Washington Market, a piece of forgotten New York history, would have celebrated its 200^th anniversary this year. The market got its start in 1812, and operated until the 1960s when it gave way to redevelopment, including the site that was to become the World Trade Center. With many of today’s cities experiencing a market renaissance, the rise and fall of the historic Washington Market offers both inspiration and wisdom for sustaining the growth of today’s farmers markets.

For most of its early history, New York was a Market City. Washington Market was one of several markets all over Manhattan, delivering fresh food to urban dwellers at a time when much more of the food was being produced locally. “When the market started, it was quite popular because it made it easier for people to get provisions from one central location,” says Hal Bromm, founder of the Committee for Washington Market Historic District. “You can imagine it as a kind of [early] urban supermarket.”

Washington Market began at the small neighborhood scale, and its growth over decades follows a trajectory recognizable in public markets to this day. David O’Neil, PPS’s public market expert, describes, “The simplest way to start is with a day table. From there, outdoor markets evolve by bringing in more vendors, selling more days, or operating at multiple locations throughout the city. Relating to Washington Market, “It started outdoors, then moved indoors, and then grew enormously over the years to include retail, wholesale, cold storage space, commission houses and brokers. When markets grow, you get to a certain scale of operations that gets other people providing supplies such as ice, lights, and hardware. There is a lot of evolution within the market and adjacent to it.”

Washington Market eventually grew to encompass several city blocks – a city within a city. It was a bustling, messy, vibrant place, active throughout all hours of the day and night. Enhanced sophistication in methods for growing and distribution allowed food to be brought in from all over the world via boat and train, then sent out to areas far beyond New York. An 1872 article published in the New York Times reveals, “Through Washington Market, filthy as it is, cramped, cabined and confined, the epicure grasps the luxuries of an entire continent, and the fruits of the islands in the tropic seas. Of such enterprise and such a trade New York ought to be, and indeed is, proud, though it cannot be concealed that the auspices under which it has grown up have not been encouraging, and the conveniences and facilities extended to it have been remarkably scanty.”

By the 1880s, there were more than 500 vendor stands and over 4,000 farmers’ wagons driving into the city daily to sell. With the growing complexity of its operations and evolution into a regional food distribution hub, New York City’s Office of Public Markets stepped in to regulate the competitive relations between farmers, wholesalers, and consumers. The office took responsibility for such things as public health and safety, traffic regulations, and weights and measurement standards. Although this specialized city bureau no longer exists, it underlines the vital role markets played in civic life.

In the end, despite its preeminence as a food center, Washington Market was forced to relocate to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 1962, overcome by a changing food system and the underlying real estate value it was sitting upon. Bromm explains, “The city’s goal was to get everyone to move to Hunts Point, where they could have a centralized location and transportation links that would make [food distribution] more efficient. By  the 1960s there was the South Street Seaport Market, which was for fishmongers and folks who dealt with seafood; Washington Market, which was produce, dairy, etc.; and then the meat market, which was up at Gansevoort and Little West 12^th Street. These three major markets each dealt with different aspects of the food chain.”

As O’Neil similarly emphasizes, “There was a lot of consolidation going on in the food industry, with bigger and bigger users and suppliers and small vendors falling to the wayside or going out of business. Washington Market was antiquated. There were all sorts of problems with aging infrastructure and accessibility, not being close to the highways.”

The perception of obsolete structures underlines Bromm’s point that “In terms of Washington Market, there was another goal, which was they thought the swath of land occupied by the market could be demolished and used as an urban renewal area. Remember, this was in the era of developers like Robert Moses.”

In the late 60s the city demolished huge swaths of the market between Greenwich, Washington, and West Streets, roughly from Laight Street at the north end all the way down to what was to become the World Trade Center site at the south. The area was cleared of many five- to six-story buildings with ground floors that housed market operators and businesses, with upper floors for offices and storage. In the book The Texture of Tribeca, which he co-authored, Bromm describes the photographs of people protesting in the street and carrying ‘Save the Washington Market’ signs. Says Bromm, “They were very upset that the city was going to move the market to Hunts Point and demolish all those buildings.”

Relegated to the margins of the city, the market quickly diminished in the public eye and never regained its former vitality as a public space. “Markets create value through socialization,” O’Neil explains, “and Hunts Point was missing the layers of people and urban uses.”

Cities today are seeing a markets make a comeback, as communities and civic leaders aim to tap into markets’ magnetic ability to attract people and bolster surrounding businesses while improving fresh food access. In 2000, there were about 2,800 farmers markets operating in the United States–a number that has now grown to over 7,000. From New York on one coast to Portland on the other, many American cities are seeing their market networks mature and thrive. The Santa Monica Farmers Market, successfully operating for over 30 years, is one of the pioneers of this new wave. Like Washington Market, it started out small and then expanded its network to encompass the four weekly markets currently operating.

Likewise market halls, once the cornerstone of community planning, are re-surging in cities large and small. In 2014, Boston Public Market anticipates moving into Parcel 7, the site of its new home with 30,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. Just last month, the community of New Bohemia in Cedar Rapids, Iowa passed a milestone with the opening of NewBo City Market. With this new market building, the community reclaims back stronger than ever a flood-ravaged industrial site.

Of course, the evolution of successful outdoor markets is not always to move into indoor market buildings. Vendors are adept at bringing infrastructure with them such as generators and refrigeration. Even with food preparations, there are a variety of possibilities from hot plates to food trucks. “If you do want more infrastructure or a permanent stall,” O’Neil remarks, “you generally go indoors. You would have more improvements like plumbing, electricity, storage, and signage.”

In addition to vendors taking stalls inside the market building, some will choose to open a permanent storefront facing the market or nearby. A market district is in the making when people, not necessarily market vendors themselves, see markets as an opportunity to start a business because of the clustering of food uses and foot traffic.

The historic Washington Market and these present-day exemplars all show how a market is more valuable than the sum of the transactions that take place immediately within its bounds. “The innovation of markets at the small scale tends to establish what people want and what works,” O’Neil explains, “which leads to larger copies in mainstream economy. It has all been quite positive. Local food and environmental movements that started in the market world and are now being picked up by Walmart and McDonalds.”

As supervisor of the Santa Monica Farmers Market program, Laura Avery’s experience is a testament to this. “The food movement is growing nation-wide,” says Avery, “and Santa Monica was there before it started. Our markets are thriving because of an incredible public interest in local sustainable food which developed a life of its own.”

The common thread that runs through all markets is that of change. As O’Neil says, “Markets are always in flux. They will be different tomorrow and you can’t get comfortable.”

However, if there is one constant throughout our country’s market history, it lies in markets’ dearly held place in public life. As a New York Times journalist wrote nearly 150 years ago, “Perhaps the chief attraction [of the Washington Market] lies in the essentially human character – in the bustle and the confusion, the rushing and the tohu bohu of the place. The rage which possesses both buyers and sellers, the concentration of purpose of so many thousands, the clangor of many voices, and the sounding of many footsteps, all impress themselves forcibly upon our imagination and appeal to our sympathies.”

Through communities’ diligence, safeguarding, and adaptability, many of the new farmers markets coming to life today will grow and last for as long, if not longer, than the historic Washington Market.