Tag: Arts

How would you spend $25K to attract River Trail users to Pottstown?

For those who have been following the development of Pottstown’s Heritage Action Plan or HAP, it’s time to rank the various projects and strategies that have surfaced.

The purpose of a HAP is to inventory and assess our heritage resources – arts, culture, history and recreation – and then come up with a vision and marketing strategy to entice hikers and bikers off the Schuylkill River Trail and into the downtown. We have already identified our resources and are now at the point of prioritizing projects and strategies for the $25,000 we hope to receive in implementation funding from the Schuylkill River Heritage Area in the coming months.

Anyone can participate! We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who care about the revitalization of Pottstown’s downtown. Here’s what to do:

Attached is a TRAIL TOWN COMPONENT RANKING  spreadsheet. If you have a few minutes over the next 24 hours, please follow the instructions below and return your rankings by tomorrow, May 11th to ptownHAP@gmail.com.

1.       Click on the link above to open the file.
2.       Rename file, adding your name, e.g. “REPKOtrailtowncomponentranking.xlsx”
3.       Rank each component on a scale of 1 to 10; 1 being extremely important to 10, not important.
4.       In the suggested location column, add a suggested location or a comment, if you want.
5.       Return the completed ranking form as an attachment in .xlsx or .xls (EXCEL) format by tomorrow, May 11th to ptownHAP@gmail.com.

Thank you in advance for your input and ideas!

If you want to learn more, you can find previous blog posts and discussions here:
https://positivelypottstown.wordpress.com/category/trail-towns-tours/ or check out Pottstown Heritage Action Plan on Facebook.

Ranking projects for Pottstown’s Heritage Action Plan

For those who have been following the development of Pottstown’s Heritage Action Plan or HAP, it’s time to rank the various projects and strategies that have surfaced. These rankings will determine the initial priorities for funding and completion.

To bring everyone up to speed… With funding from the Schuylkill River Heritage Area, Tom Carroll and I have been leading a cross-section of the community through a Heritage Action planning process on behalf of the Borough. The purpose is to produce a plan with a vision and marketing strategy around our heritage resources – arts, culture, history and recreation – so that we can entice hikers and bikers off the Schuylkill River Trail and into the downtown. We have identified our resources and ranked them, and are now at the point of prioritizing projects and strategies for the $25,000 we hope to receive in implementation funding from the SRHA in the coming months.

Anyone can be a participating partner! We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who care about the revitalization of Pottstown’s downtown. Here’s how to participate in the ranking:

Attached is a TRAIL TOWN COMPONENT RANKING  spreadsheet. If you have a few minutes over the next few days, please follow the instructions below and return your rankings by next Wednesday, May 11th to ptownHAP@gmail.com.

1.       Click on the link above to open the file.
2.       Rename file, adding your name, e.g. “Repkotrailtowncomponentranking.xlsx”
3.       Rank each component on a scale of 1 to 10; 1 being extremely important to 10, not important.
4.       In the suggested location column, add a suggested location if you are so inclined; i.e. “Bike Lane Striping” Suggestion: “Add bike lanes to Evans and Franklin Streets; connecting the North End to the Downtown”
5.       Return the completed ranking form as an attachment in .xlsx or .xls (EXCEL) format by Wednesday, May 11th to ptownHAP@gmail.com.

Thank you in advance for your input and ideas!

If you want to learn more, you can find previous blog posts and discussions here:
https://positivelypottstown.wordpress.com/category/trail-towns-tours/ or check out Pottstown Heritage Action Plan on Facebook.

The musical NUNSENSE at Tri-PAC in Pottstown!

NUNSENSE, the hilarious international hit musical, opened last night at the Tri-County Performing Arts Center in downtown Pottstown, and it runs this weekend and next weekend only.

The show focuses on the five surviving sisters at the Little Sisters of Hoboken nunnery. The nuns are organizing a talent show as a fundraiser after their order is reduced by the tainted vichyssoise soup prepared by Sister Julia, Child of God. With humor, song and dance, and audience interaction, NUNSENSE is a huge crowd-pleaser. No two shows are alike due to audience participation and improvisation by the actors. The original production received four Outer Critics Circle Awards, including best musical and became the second-longest running Off-Broadway show, bested only by THE FANTASTICKS.

NUNSENSE is showing tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm. It will run next weekend too, from Thursday through Sunday. See show times below. Ticket prices are reduced for Thursday shows and always discounted for students and seniors. Tri-PAC is located in the heart of Pottstownat 245 E. High Street. If you haven’t seen a show there, you’re missing out on one of Pottstown’s arts and cultural gems. For more info and tickets, check them out on the web at www.tripac.org.

Thursdays
May 5 (preview) & 12
7:30 pm

Fridays
May 6 & 13
8:00 pm

Saturdays
May 7 & 14
8:00 pm

Sundays
May 8 & 15
3:00 pm

Special Events
Talkback with the Director/Cast: Thursday, 5/5 & Sunday, 5/8

Tickets

ADULT:  Thurs $15; Fri, Sat & Sun $17
STUDENT/SENIOR(65+): Thurs $13; Fri, Sat, Sun $15
CHILD (12 & under): Thurs $11; Fri, Sat & Sun $13

Application deadline for $10K Arts Scholarship this Saturday!

The application deadline has been extended until this Saturday, May 7th for the Greater Pottstown Foundation Arts Scholarship

Seniors from Pottstown, Pottsgrove, the Hill School and Owen J. Roberts High Schools, who will be furthering their education in the arts, are eligible to apply. For a complete prospectus and application, please go to The Gallery School of Pottstown’s website: www.galleryonhigh.com.

The Greater Pottstown Foundation Scholarship for the Arts is designed to financially assist a qualified applicant in obtaining a degree from accredited academic institutions of higher learning for a study in the arts. The scholarship is awarded based on a scholarship essay and based on merit as measured by artistic performance at the Greater Pottstown Foundation Senior High School Art Exhibit at the Gallery School of Pottstown. The applicant’s intended field of study must include a major in an arts related field.

For application details: go to www.galleryonhigh.com today! This is a unique opportunity offered right here in Pottstown to support young artists. The Greater Pottstown Foundation supports education, the arts, tolerance and the environment in the general Pottstown, Pennsylvania area.

PEAK event & literary arts in Pottstown

An estimated 600 people, most of them Pottstown’s youngest residents, turned out for a day of fun and information-gathering at the YMCA for the annual Pottstown Early Action for Kindergarten Readiness (PEAK) Community Event to kick off the Month of the Young Child.  

Erika Hornburg-Cooper of The Gallery School creates magic!

PEAK is funded through Pennsylvania-Pre-K Counts, United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Pottstown Area Health & Wellness Foundation, and the Montgomery County Foundation and focuses on building partnerships with the early learning programs in the Pottstown community.

Please join me in sending a huge shout-out to Mary Rieck, PEAK Coordinator for the Pottstown School District, and all the other agencies and organizations who came out to share a few hours on a Sunday afternoon with the community.

PEAK was created in an effort to coordinate quality early childhood education and related services.  Every three- and four-year-old child has access to high quality child care, early childhood education, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. Parents also receive education and resources so that they can do a better job at being their child’s “first teacher.”

These are all critical to the success of Pottstown’s students, which relates directly to the town’s fiscal situation. At last week’s meeting of the new PAID board, in response to a question, Dr. Lindley said something to the effect that if a child isn’t reading at grade level early in elementary school, there’s a very high chance that child is going to be a high-school drop-out. That’s pretty disheartening – to think that any person’s educational fate may be set at such a young age. As a mom who spent many hours reading to my sons from the time they could sit up, and as a creative writer myself, I am fiercely passionate about reading, writing and storytelling. These are the ways that humans of all ages connect. On the societal level, illiteracy and an undereducated workforce strain many aspects of community life, producing all kinds of negative fiscal impacts.

Family fun

My table was set up near the folks from Montgomery County’s Head Start and the YWCA, which runs literacy programs for all ages and for families, so I got to talk with their representatives for a few minutes about what they do. This got me thinking again about the potential for the literary arts to serve Pottstown’s children, improve educational outcomes, and play a role in revitalization. (Here’s an earlier blog post/discussion.) Now I’ve got an expanded take on my prior literary dreaming… What if all the existing organizations and programs – from early childhood through adult – got together to create/coordinate a year’s worth of literary programming to expose the community to an even wider array of writers and to make literature a more visible – and visitor-friendly – part of the culture of Pottstown? 

If we added “Literary Arts” as a category of resources to the Heritage Action Plan, we’ve already got:

Feel free to add to the list, and count me in for tapping the writers and publishing professionals I’ve gotten to know through my undergraduate university and my current MFA program at Bennington College.

There’s probably an impressive line-up of writers living in and visiting Pottstown already. By adding a few more events; “sharing” visiting writers within the context of larger community events; and then advertising all these events collectively, we might find that Pottstown is just a few stanzas away from being a literary arts destination. 

Two important community meetings tonight

Two meetings tonight will provide key information on various aspects of revitalization and serve as proof of the new collaborative spirit taking hold in Pottstown.

#1  For anyone interested in the status of the Pottstown Area Industrial Development corporation (PAID), the entity responsible for economic development in the Borough, there will be a meeting to announce their new board members this evening at 6 pm at the library on the The Hill School campus. The reconstituted PAID board is an outgrowth of a recommendation by the Urban Land Institute in a 2009 report for the Borough to create a single entity for redevelopment and revitalization. See The Mercury’s article here.

#2 If you want to know more about what’s happening in the Washington Street corridor and how you can get involved, Genesis Housing is holding a meeting called “Let’s Talk” at 7 pm tonight at the Ricketts Center, where you can learn about new projects and help design a community mural. The Ricketts Center is at  640 Beech Street, Pottstown, PA 19464. Community members will be asked for their ideas for a new mural at the Chestnut Street Park and to help to set priorities and develop future projects. An update on Washington Street neighborhood projects,  including the new community garden and the Science in the Park event, will be discussed.  Community concerns about this area and other sections of the Pottstown will be explored with the hope of setting priorities for future projects.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the proposed mural in the Washington St. neighborhood will speak volumes on the tenacity and determination driving the revitalization of Pottstown.  Genesis Housing Corporation, The Gallery on High and Citizens for Pottstown’s Revitalization are in collaboration to develop a mural at the park located at Washington and Chestnut Streets.  The artistic coordinators, Cathy Paretti and Erika Hornburg-Cooper of the Gallery on High have selected Robert Louis Williams, an accomplished local artist to design and create the proposed park mural.  Let’s talk about the different types of murals and what this mural should look like – this is the chance for your input!

Judith Memberg, Executive Director of Genesis Housing Corporation, will provide an update on their Washington Street neighborhood housing developments including the rehabilitation of vacant properties for new home buyers and the homeowner rehab programs.  Information about the Pottstown Homeowner Rehab Program will be provided.

Genesis Housing Corporation serves Montgomery County as a non-profit community development organization and is dedicated to the development of affordable housing and to the education of consumers on housing and financial issues.  For more information, visit their website at www.genesishousing.org or call 610-275-4357.

Heritage Action Plan assesses resources & linkages

This past Monday, about a dozen members of the Heritage Action Plan working group gathered at the Tri-County Area Chamber of Commerce to review the results of a recent listing and ranking of Pottstown’s heritage resources.  

The map below – created by Tom Carroll – shows the clusters of historical, arts, cultural, dining and recreational resources in and around the downtown. Some highly-ranked resources received “poor” ratings for physical condition.  It’s important to keep in mind that highly-valued resources, perceived to be in poor condition, may be excellent candidates for money or attention to draw the most benefit from them in our promotional efforts.

The map also listed major annual or seasonal events hosted in/by Pottstown every year. When these events are shown by the month in which they occur, it becomes apparent that the Borough and various other organizations are holding major events that draw visitors from throughout the region 8 months out of the year. Coordinating & enhancing promotion with downtown merchants and PDIDA could be one of several recommended strategies in the HAP. Creating additional events to fill in the other months would lead to a full year of “hometown celebration” programming.

As the working group moves toward defining Pottstown’s heritage marketing strategy and branding, history and the arts emerged as themes to pursue. Here were several comments/suggestions:

  • Start giving Historic Walking Tours on First Saturdays, led by MCCC students.
  • Consider giving Cemetery Tours, esp. for John Potts Cemetery, which is now not open to the public, and for Edgewood Cemetery. Coordinate with Pottsgrove Manor.
  • Look into creating a Historic Church Tour; several churches were highly-ranked.
  • Use banners (inexpensive) to designate High St. as an “Avenue of the Arts.”
  • Use banners to generate excitement & direct visitors to downtown. Add color! 
  • Coordinate with PDIDA & downtown merchants.

The group briefly talked about tourism/hospitality amenities that are lacking or need improvement. Safety and cleanliness had been concerns in our first large group meeting back in March. 

  • High school students will be cleaning up the downtown on the April 30 Clean-Up Day, and this should be the beginning of more frequent clean-ups downtown by student volunteers.
  • Need to do a better job of tapping volunteers in the community.
  • Involve high school students in creating marketing materials.
  • Need signage, banners, kiosks to get Trail users into the downtown – still must decide how many, what goes on them, where to place them and prioritize list.
  • Need more occupied storefronts, esp. creative-related, for critical mass to attract trail users.
  • Will need lodging for overnight visitors when Trail is complete.
  • Consider a winter carnival in February.
  • HAP partners must continue to have conversations & coordinate with County & PennDOT regarding road projects and trail linkages.
As one participant noted: “This is exactly what the ULI report was talking about.”
We expect to have another large group meeting in the next couple weeks as we solicit more input on a vision statement, marketing strategies, and trail town components like signs, kiosks and connecting paths. The public is invited to join in here or by emailing PtownHAP@gmail.com.


Man-made waterfalls: A vision for Pottstown?

This past Friday, Joe Zlomek, Managing Editor of The Sanatoga Post, published an interesting revitalization story out of Rosemont, Illinois. You can check out the article here: “You can see the Pottstown waterfalls from Illinois.”

Joe describes the way this relatively new town created waterfalls at one of their gateways and at an entrance to a walkway along the Des Plaines River and asks readers to imagine something similar along Pottstown’s Schuylkill Riverfront.

With funding from the Schuylkill River Heritage Area and the William Penn Foundation, the Borough is in the midst of developing a Heritage Action Plan. The plan will lay out a vision, goals and objectives, and a marketing strategy for linking Schuylkill River Trail users to downtown resources, such as shops, restaurants, arts, culture, history and recreation. The River and the Trail are key to any revitalization and economic development strategy.

A working group meeting is taking place this morning, Monday, April 18 from 10:30am-noon. Anyone interested in being part of the planning or implementation of the Heritage Action Plan is welcome to attend this or future meetings.  Please send an email to PtownHAP@gmail.com or check out the Pottstown Heritage Action Plan on Facebook for more info.

A huge “THANK YOU” to Joe for giving us some creative food for thought!

Last call: Tix for The Gallery School’s Fashion Plates 5 fundraiser

Join The Gallery School for their 5th annual fundraiser Fashion Plates 5: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s happening this Sunday, April 10 from 1-4pm at Brookside Country Club at Prospect and Adams Streets in Pottstown.

Please note: tickets are not available at the door. All tickets must be purchased by Friday, April 8 – that’s today! To get your tickets online, click here.

This year’s theme is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the fashion show will feature pieces for him and her, courtesy of Boscov’s, and modeled by members of our community. Magical Sight and Sound will bring their musical expertise to the afternoon, and guests will be treated to a fabulous dance demonstration. Remi Rosales, co-director of the Salsa Dancing and Zumba program at the Ballroom on High and his student, Karen McArthur, will dance Remi’s salsa choreography to Ban Ban.

Your ticket includes lunch, dessert and an special endless cocktail “Tiffany Punch.” (There will also be a cash bar.) Guests will be treated to great door prizes and have the opportunity to bid on some fabulous silent auction items.

Bring a friend! Purchase two tickets for only $100, a $20 savings! Individual tickets are $60 each. Tickets for children under 12 are $30, and men are welcome, too! Your support helps The Gallery School fulfill their mission of making the arts accessible to everyone in our community.

A Vision for Pottstown: What do YOU see?

As part of the Heritage Action Plan that’s being developed with funding from the Schuylkill River Heritage Area and William Penn Foundation, representatives from lots of organizations and institutions in town got together for a workshop last month, where we talked about our individual visions for Pottstown.

A vision statement should answer these questions: What do we want to create? What do we want our community to look like?

Below is a summary of the workshop participants’ visions for Pottstown. There seemed to be consensus around the idea of a future Pottstown with a safe, clean, revitalized, business-friendly downtown that promotes heritage resources and is accessible by various modes and attractive to families and young people.

1. Envision Pottstown as a revitalized place; focus on downtown; clean up blighted properties. Need for occupied storefronts downtown.
2. Have Pottstown’s streets be clean, welcoming, attractive and safe to bring people into town; heighten police presence; create safe link between Hill School & downtown.
3. Project a new, positive, business-friendly image.
4. Develop and promote a sense of place.
5. Promote a garden feel to Pottstown.
6. Build on existing arts and culture as economic development tool.
7. Envision Pottstown as a place that works together with existing assets/resources.
8. Pottstown should be the cultural leader in the region. Must coordinate offerings.
9. Move drug treatment center to new location.
10. Give Pottstown a progressive image. Add a new twist in arts, culture & sustainability that ties into the trail, natural resources & Pottstown’s history (pie, steel, railroad.)
11. Promote health and healthy living, farmers’ market, bike-sharing program, vibrant streetscape, activity on streets, eyes on the street. Create comfortable atmosphere, place where families are active, walking on streets.
12. Enhance and create transportation linkages, especially to improve foot traffic for businesses; be pedestrian-friendly; improve way-finding. Highlight the airport as a resource. Create a multi-modal community.
13. Market studio & residential space to art students; need more bars/entertainment for young people.

WHAT’S YOUR VISION FOR POTTSTOWN?

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