Welcome!
We've created this blog to help generate enthusiasm for a new community arts space in the Madison Valley neighborhood.
The Background
Martin Luther King Jr. School has been a fixture in the Madison Valley neighborhood in Seattle for nearly a century. The school, first named Harrison school, was constructed in 1913. It was renamed for Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1974. In 2006, the Seattle School District closed the school as part of of its consolidation process. In 2007, the district announced that the school would be surplussed and sold for other uses.
A Space for the Community
In early 2008, members of the community, including the president of the Greater Madison Valley Community Council, began to investigate the potential for creating a public community arts center in the former school.
In March, a group toured the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in West Seattle, a former public school that opened as a community cultural center in 2006. The center is fantastic: it includes a 150-seat theater, state-of-the-art dance studio, an audio recording studio and media center, and public meeting spaces and classrooms. It also houses 36 rent-controlled live-work spaces for artists. Many of these are in converted classrooms. Youngstown also rents office space to 7 nonprofits and arts organizations.
Youngstown is a vibrant hub of the Delridge community. And it is thriving: director Randy Engstrom told us that the theater is booked most weekends throughout the year, and that various rentals, from office space to classrooms, provide the vast majority of the center's operating revenue. We believe Madison Valley is ready for such a center and we are willing to make it happen.
A Community Movement
We have begun to organize and involve members of the Madison Valley, Madison Park, and Madrona communities. Keeping Martin Luther King a true community space would help us continue to make our neighborhood an even more connected and livable community.
A Madison Valley Arts Center would be community "idea center" where creativity is encouraged. A place where people could meet for book groups, yoga classes, or children's pottery workshops. A place where some classrooms would be converted to affordable housing for creative people who might not otherwise afford the neighborhood. A place for local theater, chamber music, children's birthday parties or hip-hop dance performances.
It will take a lot of work. We'll need your help: to help raise funds, to organize a nonprofit, to mail letters, to contact allies, to e-mail the school board and our elected officials. But we can do it. Our neighborhood needs and deserves this, and with your help we will make it happen.
E-mail me to find out how you can help. Or attend the next meeting of the Greater Madison Valley Community Council.
Or help us right now: E-mail school board member Mary Bass here in support of a of community arts center for Martin Luther King.
E-mail council members Nick Licata and Richard Conlin to voice your support.
And join us Wed. March 19 at 7:30 p.m. at the Bush School commons for a community meeting on the future of MLK school.
Thanks
Andy Engelson
