KALAMAZOO, MI — One woman’s simple desire to add a public sculpture to her neighborhood has become a campaign to create a little park for public leisure. The instigator is Jane Schelhas, a 30-year resident of Kalamazoo’s Edison neighborhood and an artist who makes metal sculptures.
Not long ago, she donated money to the
Edison Neighborhood Association (ENA) and stipulated it must be used to help pay for the installation of a sculpture in a public place. The ENA knew just the place, a small plaza in front of The Creamery apartment building at Portage and Lake streets. The plaza has a 10-foot-diameter, concrete planter, and Hollander Development Corp., owner of the three-story, 48-apartment building, always intended to install a sculpture there.
So the neighborhood association made a plan to raise $20,000 to buy a large sculpture and pay for its installation. (The sum must be raised by Aug. 17. Tax-deductible donations can be made at
patronicity.com/edison. Nearly $4,500 has been raised as of July 15.) The association also investigated getting a matching grant and learned that one could be given by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. (MEDC). However, that agency insists there must be more than a lone sculpture.
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Mike WenningerThis is the plaza that can be a pocket park.“There had to be more community involvement,” says the artist Jane Schelhas. “There’s a dance studio and a little art gallery right there in the building, and the kids come out and sit on that planter all the time. So we’re making that more of a little park, having benches and more greenery.” Plans also include putting a mural on the north wall of The Creamery.
Promoters of the pocket park see it not only as a place for children to play and adults to relax and socialize, but also as a gateway marker that tells people they’re entering the vibrant Edison community.
Schelhas says, “We’re going to pay an artist $12,000 to make an 8-foot to 12-foot-tall sculpture that will be placed in the middle of that planter.” Artists in Kalamazoo County can submit proposals for the sculpture until the end of July. They can apply
here.
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Mike WenningerJane Schelhas poses in her yard with one of her creations.
The planter is about two feet tall, and Schelhas says, “It lends itself to having ‘Edison’ and ‘Washington Square’ signage on it. So you’re coming from downtown and you see this lovely sculpture and it identifies what our neighborhood is and that this area is Washington Square.”
Washington Square, centered at Portage and Washington streets, was once the Edison neighborhood’s version of a downtown, a retail area where residents could buy most of what they needed. This business district resulted from Edison’s boom times, the early 1900s.
America began changing in the 1950s with increasing auto ownership, people moving to suburbs, and the development of shopping centers and malls. Washington Square started losing businesses. In recent years, there’s been progress on revitalizing the area.
On entering The Creamery apartments from the plaza, you walk into a large space that’s been Move With Joy Studio since January 2022. The studio, operated by Joy Morris-Burton and Aerick Burton, offers classes in dance, yoga, and pilates. The big space doubles as an art gallery, the walls and lighting having been designed for that purpose. The gallery shows usually feature local artists, and they change frequently.
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Courtesy photoChildren play on the site of the proposed pocket park.Joy is excited about the proposed pocket park, noting that the plaza already functions as a kids’ playground and a place for adults to meet and greet. She also sees Edison becoming an arts district. “If you want to find the live music, the live dance, the art projects happening that the community can be a part of, that’s happening in Edison,” she says.
Edison lies southeast of downtown and has about 9,000 residents, making it the city’s largest neighborhood by population. It’s also one of the largest by area.
Diversity is Edison’s outstanding feature, according to Stephen Dupuie, executive director of the neighborhood association. The 2020 census reported this breakdown of the population: 57 percent white, 32 percent Black, 18 percent Hispanic, 9 percent other.
This totals more than 100 percent, and Dupuie explains why: “The census tract for Edison consists of four different tracts. Plus, the percentage of race data can add up to more than 100 percent because the census allows individuals to self-identify with multiple racial categories. This means a person can select more than one race when responding to the census.
“Hands-down the No. 1 thing I say when people ask what’s my favorite part about the neighborhood, it’s the diversity and just the culture of it. The residents are really warm.”
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Mike WenningerStephen Dupuie, executive director of the Edison Neighborhood Association stands by the mural on the ENA office building.Dupuie sees the diversity helping Edison realize its goal of becoming Kalamazoo’s arts district. “We see that Edison is already this budding arts district. We see it already in the neighborhood with a lot of working artists. For us, it’s really about recognizing the grassroots movement that’s already happening and how to foster that and support it, and bring attention to it.
“This is the neighborhood where people can afford to live and work as an artist. There’s a lot of appeal there. Kalamazoo as a whole is a great artist community, but in terms of where you’re living and all of that, Edison is the place.”
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Courtesy of Move with JoyAerick Burton and Joy Morris-Burton perform in a dance style they call breakin’ ballet, which mixes break dancing with ballet.Metal artist Schelhas says, “Public art is a wonderful way to include people who aren’t necessarily ever going to go into a museum and a way for them to be uplifted by art and color. Edison is projecting an image of art and color.”
The neighborhood is where creative people have a good chance of finding affordable housing and studio space. “The housing stock is amazing in Edison,” Dupuie says. “We have these really great grand boulevards and these 100-year-old-plus houses with all this really great woodwork and really good bones in a lot of the neighborhood. It’s still relatively affordable in terms of the housing market, which is crazy.”
On the eastern edge of Edison, at 1501 Fulford St., is a true mixed bag of creativity called Jerico. It’s a complex of three large, former industrial plants, the first one built in 1898. A decade ago, new owners converted the buildings into a center for multiple uses, now numbering 27 enterprises. The range includes artists’ studios, a coffee shop, a performance venue, a tattoo shop, a recording studio, and even a little light manufacturing.
The neighborhood association is capitalizing on having Washington Square on the west side and Jerico on the east. ENA has started an occasional event called the Washington Avenue Arts and Culture Crawl (WAACC), purposely not an art hop because the pace is intended to be leisurely. It begins at the square and ends at Jerico.
The ENA’s program director, Emma Master, says, “The crawl is to get people to move through the neighborhood and take in all that Edison has to offer. It’s beautiful, it’s historic, and there are these great businesses on either end of this one-mile stretch.” There’s music, food, and activities for children.
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Mike WenningerEmma Master holds a garlic while standing by onions and sunflowers in the Edison Neighborhood Association garden.The neighborhood association promotes many activities, and home gardening is one. ENA puts on a series of workshops in its garden behind its office to teach residents how to grow food and preserve it.
“We call it urban homesteading, not urban farming so that we can integrate programming that’s not just about growing outside,” Master says. “It’s like once you grow the food, what do you do with it, how do you preserve it. So now people have this garden and they’re growing tons of carrots, and now they can also know how to ferment and can and preserve those things they’ve grown.”
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Courtesy photoDrawings show the goal of the pocket park campaign.
Read more about
Jerico here.
Read more about
the Edison neighborhood here.
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This story is part of Southwest Michigan Journalism Collaborative’s coverage of equitable community development, a topic readers told us they wanted to know more about when surveyed. SWMJC is a group of 12 regional organizations dedicated to strengthening local journalism. Visit swmichjournalism.com to learn more.