Council helps spruce up Cliff/Cannon

No other neighborhood council throws a party like the Cliff/Cannon Neighborhood Council. “The lower South Hill block party is like the fourth-largest event in Spokane,” said CCNC’s Judy Gardner. “It gets 2,000 people a year.”

As its annual soiree illustrates, the neighborhood council’s projects tend to spill over into the rest of the city. Among their more ambitious projects are cell-tower reform, a street reopening and the city’s first community food forest.

The Cliff/Cannon neighborhood borders are the Interstate 90 corridor to the north, Division Street and Grand Boulevard to the east and 16th Avenue to the south. The western border runs along the bluff and includes the High Drive Conservation Area.

The annual block party, held on the third Saturday in September, began 12 years ago as part of the national Night Out Against Crime initiative.

“It’s all free,” said council liaison Patricia Hansen. “Families can come with as many kids as they want. They can get fed, go to the kids’ area, listen to the music, and go pet the animals the Humane Society brings in.”

One neighborhood couple donates $200 for ice cream every year. “It’s those kinds of people that really help us get together,” Hansen said.

The neighborhood council helps fund the block party with a yard sale, scheduled this year for June 23. “Each year it keeps getting a little bit bigger and better,” said John Schram, who coordinates the event along with Bonnie Aisen

Cell-tower reform was an extensive – and expensive – process. Hansen spearheaded the neighborhood’s drive to get them updated.

The city signed an ordinance updating rules and procedures for cell tower construction in November 2015. The neighborhood council rang up $22,000 in legal fees during the process.

“We pass the bear at every meeting,” Hansen said, referring to a plastic bear they use, like passing the hat.

“I think we are about $18,000 in the hole.”

Four north-south arterials run through the Cliff/Cannon neighborhood, funneling city traffic up and down the South Hill. “Rush hour really sucks,” Hansen said. “The arterials are always crammed with traffic.”

The council took a personal interest in getting Madison Street reopened between Third and Fourth avenues, so local traffic could get around the inevitable rush-hour jams. “We don’t have a lot of exit points from the South Hill,” Hansen said. “That little jaunt on Madison Street, we used that a lot.”

The council organized neighborhood business owners, showed up at Spokane City Council meetings and buttonholed council members at every opportunity. “We were very vocal,” Hansen said. “Now we will have that access back, which is huge for us.”

Beautification

Polly Judd Park was once a pile of rubble. “It was a landfill from the 1974 World’s Fair,” Hansen said. “(Now) it’s our little gem.”

Improvements to the park, established in 1992, include an Americans with Disabilities Act-friendly walking path, sprinkler systems, picnic tables, a splash pad, playground equipment, a shelter with restrooms and the neighborhood’s community garden.

Also housed within the park is the Polly Judd Food Forest, now in its fourth growing season. “This is … the first food forest in the city. We’ve planted trees that will create food for the community,” Hanson said.

Other neighborhood council targets are historic designation, flower baskets, sidewalks and bricks. Lots of bricks.

The council hopes to begin the historic district process in early 2019. “Browne’s Addition is the first,” Hansen said. “We asked to be the second.”

A 2015 remodel added storm gardens and swales along Lincoln and Monroe streets to capture and reuse storm water. “As part of it, our business centers got these beautiful antique lampposts,” Gardner said.

Each lamppost includes a water line and a hook for hanging a flower basket. Gardner, Schram and Huckleberries manager Monica Hampton volunteered to raise funds to cover the cost of the flowers.

City irrigation crews put the baskets up in the spring and take them down in the fall. “We would have had a hard time meeting our budget if we’d had to (cover) that,” Gardner said.

One issue begging for a solution is the neighborhood’s crumbling sidewalks. “We have the worst sidewalks in the city,” Hansen said. “We’re on a hill, with a lot of trees, all planted a long time ago. They just eat the sidewalks up.”

Hansen said the council would support a citywide sidewalk bond issue, but Gardner suggests a cheaper solution.

“In several of the New England states, I found they use asphalt. It gives to the roots, it’s flexible, and repair is a lot easier,” Gardner said.

“We have the asphalt trucks on the street, fixing potholes,” she said. “Can we do asphalt shims on the bad sidewalks, not for beautification but for safety?”

When the use of asphalt on cracked sidewalks was put to city engineer Bob Turner, he declined to comment.

The neighborhood is involved with the ongoing Maple/Jefferson Gateway Master Plan, a beautification project along I-90.

Said Hansen: “We got out and we walked that whole area. We looked at it from (all) perspectives. Our neighborhood council meetings were on the same day, so I would just walk from the meetings to the neighborhood council, give an update, and ask for feedback.”

One suggestion was to donate some of the neighborhood’s stockpile of over 3,000 bricks, rescued during the Lincoln/Monroe street remodel. Volunteers cleaned the bricks, originally part of a 1910 street-paving project, and stored them near Polly Judd Park.

The city used some of the bricks to build a sitting wall in a pocket park at 14th Avenue and Lincoln. The original estimate was 1,000 bricks, but they only used about 200. “We thought we were going to use a whole bunch of our bricks there, but we used maybe a pallet,” Hansen said.

“I thought, oh my … we’ll have bricks for life,” she said, laughing.