Westerly's new direction

WESTERLY — They are alternately subtle and striking.

Take a stroll through downtown and you’ll see a dozen murals painted on a variety of buildings, celebrating the rich history of this nearly 350-year-old community. Four more murals adorn buildings in neighboring Pawcatuck, Connecticut. Some are in plain sight, others you have to work a little harder to see — painted on the side of a building in an alleyway or several stories up from street level.

All of them tell a story.

From the Hurricane of 1938 and the century-old Westerly-Stonington high school football rivalry to Westerly Telephone, one of the first automated telephone companies in the country, and Wilcox Park, a 15-acre oasis in the middle of downtown. The murals combine art and history, with a dose of economic development mixed in.

Bricks & Murals, a nonprofit formed in early 2017, was the driving force behind the project, which drew more than 100 artists from across the country and as far away as Germany for a five-day painting festival in September 2017. The murals have been a conversation-starter ever since.

“This is about a community remembering itself, remembering its history and then putting it forward,” said Jean Gagnier, a former town councilman who worked for years to secure buy-in from the community on putting up the murals. “If you go to a church, you see stained glass and it tells a story. These murals tell a story about this community and about the people who were involved or the institutions that were here at one time.”

It is part of a larger revitalization of the downtown that includes a vibrant restaurant and music scene, the renovation of the YMCA and the debut next year of the newly refurbished United Theater, which will be a regional hub for the arts.

“Public art can be an economic engine, it can make a place interesting, it can differentiate one area from another,” Gagnier said. He added that Westerly and Pawcatuck have adopted a theme: “Two states, two towns, one community.”

Wendy Brown was skeptical when she first heard about the mural plan. Brown, who moved to Rhode Island from Arizona in 2000, was the newly minted president of the Downtown Business Association in 2016, after relocating her real estate business to High Street four years earlier. Despite her doubts, Brown felt obligated to attend a presentation Gagnier made in 2016 at the library.

There, she learned about a group called The Walldogs, an international organization of sign painters and muralists who travel from community to community to work on projects like the one in downtown Westerly. Cam Bortz, a Westerly resident and Walldogs member for two decades, helped sell her that night.

“I saw the slides of what was the artwork that the Walldogs had done in the Midwest,” Brown said. “I was very impressed with it, very impressed. And I said, ‘OK, I’m in.’”

Brown would wind up becoming president of the Bricks & Murals nonprofit, which raised $150,000. It was the Walldogs’ first project in the Northeast.

“I think what’s particularly cool about [the murals] is the local history,” Brown said. “And for me, I got to learn a lot about Westerly that I had no idea. Even locals didn’t know. All of a sudden, we’re memorializing this history that makes this town unique in an artistic way permanently for all generations.”

Gagnier said that not long after they were finished, a lifelong Westerly resident in his 70s approached him. “He said, ‘Thanks for making me fall in love with my town again.’”

But Brown was also wearing her business association hat when she signed on.

“This is a way that we can single out Westerly downtown and make it unique enough to attract people here,” she said. “And the murals were a way that I saw that we could create another economic generator. Brand the downtown and make it something special.”

She cited communities in the Midwest where the Walldogs’ work had led to a dramatic increase in tourism and visitors to their downtowns.

Gagnier said the murals prompted some of the building owners to make improvements at their own expense, such as fixing broken bricks or concrete.

“We were willing to do it where the mural existed as part of the arrangement. We were told by the owners, ‘No, I’m going to do that, I’m going to do the whole side of my building.’”

The Westerly-Stonington high school football rivalry, which dates to 1911, is painted on the side of CC O’Brien’s Sports Café in Pawcatuck, the first business to agree to have a mural on its building. It depicts a Westerly Bulldog and a Stonington Bear on either side of the mural and two players facing off at midfield with a scoreboard that reads: 7-7.

A block away, a painting memorializing “The Great New England Hurricane of 1938” is tucked away on the side of a building, in the alley, on West Broad Street. It includes a sunken ship and flooded houses.

The largest painting is on the side of the 86-year-old Knickerbocker Café (now called The Knickerbocker Music Center) and illustrates how the initial concept sometimes evolved into a much different finished product. Brown said that after seeing the first design, she spoke with the artist, who had only seen old posters of the club. She told him about the history of musicians taking the Knickerbocker Express train, playing at the club and staying overnight in Westerly.

That translated into a mural spanning the entire parking-lot side of the storied building, across the street from the Amtrak station. The Knickerbocker Express is rolling along a musical keyboard to the left, and musicians playing a variety of instruments are set to the right.

It hasn’t ended with the murals. The nonprofit over the summer put the finishing touches on a new “Harmony Trail” that also spans both towns. A dozen metal musical instruments, many looking like keyboards, are tuned to play in harmony — meaning anyone can use them and make beautiful music.

They are durable, meant to withstand the elements, with rubber mallets attached by ropes, ready for any visitor to pick up and begin playing.

“I can barely play a musical note myself, but I found these amazing instruments, there was no discord, anybody can play them, every two notes are [in] harmony,” said Tim Lebling, president of the Downtown Business Association, who pitched bringing the instruments to Westerly after a family trip to Indiana in the summer of 2018.

“My 4-year-old son at the time said, ‘Dad, why don’t we have these in our town?’”

Lebling, who lived in Alaska for 25 years before moving to Westerly in 2013, didn’t have a good answer. So he advocated bringing the instruments to Westerly and Pawcatuck — just as Gagnier had worked to see the mural project become a reality.

“And this vision of putting them through the community, as opposed to just one park, so appealed to this kind of musical campus that’s being created in this downtown area,” he said, adding that the group was able to raise $70,000 in six months.

The instruments were installed just in time for the annual Summer Pops concert in Wilcox Park in June. Lebling’s son, Jude, led a musical parade, walking from instrument to instrument, and the creator spoke about the key characteristics of each.

“No sooner did we have these instruments in the ground where we had residents coming out and playing,” Lebling said. “That alone really provided what the gift of music can give you: people can come out and use this as a tool, as entertainment, as something they normally don’t get to do.”

So what’s next? The group held a “Downtown Shutdown” the last Thursday in September: High Street was blocked off, with food trucks and musical entertainment that drew thousands of people. It was the third year of celebrating the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. The event was an outgrowth of the celebration associated with the five-day mural painting in September 2017, which included trolley rides that went from site to site.

Brown said she could see more murals going up in Pawcatuck, but she thinks downtown Westerly has enough. Lebling said he’s not sure what the next project will be, but he’s open to suggestions.

“One of the challenges I put out when I became the president of the business association was: Find a cool idea that you’ve seen work somewhere else and bring it back to us and let’s try it.”

The Rhode Island Spotlight is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that relies, in part, on donations. For more information, go to RhodeIslandSpotlight.org. Reach Jim Hummel at Jim@RhodeIslandSpotlight.org.