The smell of smoke still lingered a few days after the devastating fire that erupted on Hillsboro’s Main Street in the early hours of 2022. The arson-sparked blaze killed one person, destroyed the Weil Arcade building, displaced several businesses, forced temporary closure of others — and thoroughly dispirited a community already struggling to recover from pandemic shutdowns. 

While political and business leaders reeled, artists stepped up. Just days after the Jan. 2 conflagration, local musicians and other artists staged a benefit for downtown to raise money and spirits for the disheartened central city. Others soon followed. Today, Main Street is thriving, heralded by a multitude of performances and exhibitions within a few blocks of the fire. As always, the arts provided a beacon for a community’s way forward. 

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OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An occasional series

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The arts’ prominent role in Main Street’s post-combustion revival is only the latest chapter in Hillsboro’s 21st-century strategy of investing in the arts as a way to vitalize its downtown. The continuing effort is especially visible and audible during the summer, when Main Street hosts three weekly street parties and markets that teem with music, visual arts and crafts, and food. That’s in addition to performances at the street’s two theaters, shows, and exhibitions at the city’s Walters Cultural Arts Center. Even when winter’s chill descends, Main Street is often enlivened by arts events at those theaters and the Walters, as well as First Tuesday Art Walks, restaurants, and more. Main Street’s arts-led resurgence has rejuvenated a once-slumbering economy. 

Hillsboro’s arts-forward downtown development is no accident. Much of it stems from a long-incubating municipal strategy to use Main Street arts as a cultural hub that in turn spins off economic benefits for the entire downtown and beyond. But there is work still to do, arts advocates say, in terms of increasing diversity in the arts community, securing civic support and funding, and continuing the climb out of the pandemic depression.

JUMP-STARTING THE ARTS

Development of Hillsboro’s downtown has long been constrained by its unusual location, perched on the city’s far western edge and distant from more-developed areas of Portland, Beaverton, and even other Hillsboro neighborhoods such as Orenco Station, said Scott Palmer, who grew up in Hillsboro in the 1970s and ’80s and later returned to lead Bag&Baggage theater on Main Street for 15 years until departing in 2018. As is the case with many other American cities, the rise of regional shopping malls in the 1960s and ‘70s drained downtown of much mercantile vitality.

With too few restaurants and bars to sustain much nightlife, Main Street emptied after merchants and workers at city and county administration buildings went home. Especially after the 2008 recession, vacancies sapped the street of customers and their spending. For much of the early oughts, Main Street felt moribund.

The city responded with several plans to turn downtown into an active, vibrant 18-hour city, with subsidies and other programs to spruce up Main Street and surrounding avenues. The arts were a keystone. 

“Over the last 20 years, Hillsboro has prioritized downtown’s revitalization,” wrote Hillsboro Downtown Manager Karla Antonini in an email. “The arts have been, and continue to remain, an integral part of the strategy. We work collaboratively across City Departments to invest in quality of life for our community — which includes supporting a vibrant, connected, and thriving local economy.” She cited a series of planning documents, including the 2010 Downtown Urban Renewal Plan, that “recognize the role that arts and culture play in the economic revitalization of a downtown.” 

In 2019, Hillsboro’s newly created Cultural Arts District aimed to connect arts and economic and community development on Main Street and its adjacent avenues, as well as nearby Calle Diez (10th Avenue), and M&M Marketplace (see ArtsWatch’s story), which this summer hosted its third annual summer El Sol Festival (story), with music and other arts programming. The latter two hubs promise real benefits to their primarily Latino working class neighborhoods and help avoid the appearance of gentrification that’s raised concerns in some other arts-forward revivals. 

Gradually, life and activity returned to Main Street, in part ignited by the arrival of Bag&Baggage Productions. Palmer’s visionary, audience-friendly leadership raised the artistic bar in the Portland suburbs. Washington County theater lovers no longer had to venture into Portland to experience high-quality theater. 

Palmer said that by the time he left six years ago, Bag&Baggage was consistently selling out its Main Street venues, first the old Venetian Theater (since refurbished into an event space) and then its purpose-built The Vault. 

Then came the pandemic, and then the fire, which staggered downtown businesses. Now, though, the comeback continues.

“Cities across the U.S. recognize that a healthy downtown is essential to a healthy economy, and they’re looking at the role the arts play in creating vital downtowns,” said Bridie Harrington, who manages the Cultural Arts District. She points to a city-sponsored stipend program that has added attractive street lighting, city-commissioned murals and other public art, and other measures to make Main Street feel safe, welcoming, and happening. “Coming from the devastation of COVID and the fire, we’re seeing a kind of energy and brightness emerging downtown.”

Those additions build on Main Street’s arts-friendly infrastructure – TriMet drops bus and MAX passengers from across the Portland area at a transit center just steps away from downtown’s theaters, shops (several of which sell craftworks by local artisans), galleries, two music stores that sell instruments and offer music lessons, an art supply store, restaurants, and pubs – and from the human scale of the first four blocks of East Main Street itself. It’s hard to replicate the intimate feel of those century-old main streets.

FESTIVAL FEVER

“How do you draw people to the downtown area?” Harrison Butler asked rhetorically. “You gotta put on a show! Whether it’s on the street or in a theater, people want to come to where things are happening.”

Butler is co-executive director of Hillsboro Downtown Partnership (HDP), which promotes downtown via everything from beautifying the streetscape to attracting investors and merchants to sharing information and resources to throwing parties, which happens frequently on Main, especially during the summer.

Butler also knows how to put on a show: His day job is artistic director of Main Street’s Hillsboro Artists Regional Theatre (HART). Arriving in 2022 from Los Angeles, where he ran a theater academy, Butler not only revitalized what had been a shaky community theater but also quickly found a bigger stage for his welcoming attitude: the first four blocks of East Main Street and surrounding avenues. His HDP co-director, EJ Payne, is also president of the board of the Washington County arts nonprofit Tualatin Valley Creates, which means a pair of arts people are running the city’s major downtown advocacy organization. 

You can’t spell “party” without “art,” and the downtown plan identified festivals as crucial to revitalizing Main Street. HDP helps with weekly arts-enhanced summer events such as Friday Night Bites, Saturday Farmers Market, and Tuesday Night Market, as well as Halloween and Christmas celebrations. On summer Tuesday nights, a stroll down the culture-centric blocks of Main Street can put you in earshot of up to half a dozen live music acts — three different stages, assorted buskers, and outdoor performers at Pizzario restaurant, Weil Arcade food cart pod, and Noble Hop craft beer bar. In these moments, Main Street starts to feel like my old hometown of Austin.

“It’s crucial for these downtown events that artists and businesses come together and bring people in to experience what the downtown has to offer,” Butler explained. “The idea is to make them want to come back.”

Other organizations pitch in, too, such as Tualatin Valley Creates and its La Strada dei Pastelli Chalk Art Festival, which involves dozens of artists of all ages. After the festival began in Beaverton in 2019, Hillsboro took over as host sponsor in a public-private partnership with TVC, signing a five-year contract to turn Main Street into La Strada for one long weekend each summer. 

TVC Executive Director Yasmin Ruvalcaba estimates that more than 30,000 people attended this year’s event over three days in July, quadruple the inaugural festival’s attendance. The throngs were “very intergenerational, from young kids — we provide guided talk activities for them — to elders in the community. We see it all.” 

Ruvalcaba said this year’s festival drew more support from sponsors and therefore incorporated more artists, including more national artists, and added “troubadour” performers who wandered throughout the festival. Although the chalk art is the main draw, “we also use this space to introduce them to other art forms — dance groups, music, cultural arts groups,” Ruvalcaba said. 

“La Strada di Pastelli is what the Cultural Arts District is all about,” Butler said. “It’s bringing the arts to the streets. It allows people to walk down the street and view beautiful art in a traffic-free environment. When you bring it out into the street, it’s available to everyone. You don’t have to pay for a ticket or make a reservation. All you have to do is come downtown.”

That accessibility, in turn, exposes demographically diverse crowds to locally grown arts. HDP estimates that the summer Tuesday night markets draw 4,000 to 6,000 attendees, and the Halloween festival (which, like La Strada, closes off an additional block of Main to cars) more than 8,500, perhaps attracted by the 2 million pieces of candy HDP gives away — and probably providing a boost to the half-dozen downtown dentists’ offices. “We’re inviting the rich tapestry of culture in Hillsboro to come and express their culture,” Butler said. 

He also receives increasing praise and support from downtown merchants who, by showcasing performers and visual artists in their retail spaces (often including the products of local vintners), have gained a new appreciation for local artists, their work — and their economic impact. “I keep hearing, ‘We need more stuff like this here,’” Butler said. “It’s obvious there’s a thirst for these kinds of events downtown. We’re looking at expanding those opportunities, to keep it as a hub not just for the people of Hillsboro, but regionally — to attract people from all over Oregon.” 

In working with the city and HDP on this and other arts projects, Ruvalcaba has come to appreciate Hillsboro’s “willingness to share resources and assets,” from providing minutiae like traffic barriers (to divert cars from closed-off Main) and extension cords to formulating emergency plans. “There’s something special about the downtown Hillsboro area that draws lots of investment from local businesses, and other community partners that want to see Main Street thrive,” Ruvalcaba said. 

Still, she worries about the sustainability of big arts events like La Strada in an uncertain funding environment. “Post-COVID, we see a community hungry for arts and events, so this is the time to support that and advance it. But within the arts community, we’re also seeing a drop in arts funding available for organizations like Centro Cultural [the regional Latino cultural organization] and TVC, which makes it harder to sustain events like this..” 

PERMANENT PILLARS

Although the outdoor festivals recede with the summer sunshine, the arts partying continues throughout the year with First Tuesday Art Walks. Besides showcasing local artists’ work at Main Street galleries and other businesses, the event places 60-plus local musicians performing in about 20 downtown restaurants, galleries, and shops. Participating businesses pay $25 and the city chips in $100-$150 more to musicians for the series, curated by Bill Hernandez, a retired Nike executive, TVC board member, and guitarist-songwriter who directs Influence Music Hall, which lost its brick-and-mortar space during the pandemic and pivoted to becoming essentially a booking agency. 

The city’s own arts venue, the Glenn & Viola Walters Cultural Arts Center, hosts weekly concerts as well as exhibits, classes, artisan pop-up shops, and more (story). I recently strolled over to a performance of Portland Opera’s adeptly curated (by mezzo-soprano Jessica Blau), tightly arranged ¡Viva España!, a free, broadly entertaining, and well-attended evening of theatrical songs and dances, exhilaratingly performed by artists from Portland, New York, San Francisco Bay Area, and Texas. The city also runs a local artist gallery in its Main Street Civic Center.

Main Street’s other two major performing arts venues celebrate significant birthdays this year. Just a couple of blocks separate Butler’s community theater HART (30^th anniversary) and the professional theater Bag&Baggage (20^th), both of which welcomed energetic new artistic leaders last year. 

Bag&Baggage’s Nik Whitcomb (story) is “just what Hillsboro needs, and we hit it off immediately,” Butler said. “He was ready to ride with me. We stagger our seasons. We loan each other props and costumes. They are doing really edgy, sometimes out-there, more dramatic, adult-oriented shows, whereas normally at our community theater, we stick to classics and family favorites. So you can see a wide variety of types of theater in Hillsboro.”

The city provides an annual subsidy to Bag&Baggage as an “anchor organization” for the Cultural Arts District, and it has supported Whitcomb’s efforts to provide free or reduced-price tickets to marginalized communities. He’s also inviting other organizations to use The Vault for meetings, performances, and community gatherings. Bag&Baggage recently incubated the new Hillsboro Film Festival (story) and Native Theater Project (story).

“The relationship I have with this city is unlike any relationship ever experienced in my career,” said Whitcomb, who communicates frequently with city officials. “There’s a level of connection with these folks that’s unprecedented for me as an artist.”

As Hillsboro has diversified demographically, Whitcomb, who is Black, sees strong support for his own inclusive efforts. “Hillsboro’s on the right track,” he said. “It’s trying as a city to develop a common language around DEI and to create space for people of diverse backgrounds to be celebrated. Everyone I know who owns a business or works downtown is on the same page and interested in bringing true diversity of race and culture and age to Main Street. I’m happy to be a part of that tribe.”

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

As the arts draw people downtown to festivals and other performances, that sparks development that in turn benefits Main Street’s arts institutions. Over the past year or so, several nearby apartment and condominium complexes have opened, including (soon) Main Street’s newest and tallest building, a seven-story senior retirement housing complex surmounting first-floor retail stores. 

A number of new restaurants have also sprung up on and near Main, including the 30-cart indoor/outdoor Hillsboro Downtown Station, lovingly reclaimed from an old Studebaker dealership by a local investor and — of great symbolic importance – a smaller cart pod that just arose from the ashes of Main Street’s Weil Arcade, consumed in the 2022 flames. Naturally, it too features live music. There are rumors of a new Indian cultural center, a youth theater, and a major housing/retail complex that might arrive in coming months or years.

Still, like virtually every other arts-related venture, Main Street businesses, including arts venues, are recovering from the pandemic shock. And the recent struggles of Hillsboro’s (and Oregon’s) major employer, Intel, cast a shadow over the ongoing recovery, as did this spring’s unexpected demise of the 5,000-square-foot visual arts hub Sequoia Studios + Gallery.

Though visual art abounds at the Walters, in various downtown vintage and antique shops (including the new art-centric Dee’s Divine Finds), Main Street’s Catherine Bede Gallery, and the Civic Center, Sequoia’s closure in May deprived downtown of its primary visual arts hub. Last month, the city issued a request for proposals to “sublease this space to an arts organization that can become an active participant in the arts and small business community in Hillsboro.” 

Palmer, who’s as responsible as anyone for putting Hillsboro arts on the Oregon map, thinks the city’s smaller-scale arts organizations can be more resilient in inevitable cyclical economic downturns. During the pandemic, Bag&Baggage’s annual budget plummeted from about $1 million to a third of that. But compared to large institutions such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, “going from $800,000 to $400,000 isn’t nearly as hard as going from $80 million to $40 million. Smaller and mid-sized budget companies with smaller staffs can be more responsive to change, because they’re so much more flexible. I think we can get back to where we were, as long as we make sure we’re doing good quality work and we’re respectful of the community we’re performing in.”

Yet Palmer remains frustrated by what he sees as the city’s inadequate commitment to the Cultural Arts district he once championed.

“It was a great idea,” he said. “The City Council approved it and nothing has happened since. It’s such a missed opportunity. Where is the strategy and support? Calling it a district doesn’t make it so. You have to have robust public policy that supports the development of new nonprofit arts organizations. The clawing back of arts and culture after the pandemic should be made easier by local government,” not impeded by “the bureaucracy of having the cultural district run by a body that takes years and years to make decisions. It should be empowered to take risks and not be risk averse.” 

Palmer also laments the city’s failure to invest adequately in Main Street arts that reflect the city’s growing diversity. 

“It makes no sense to me whatsoever that there is not a thriving, active, professional, Spanish-speaking, Latino-based arts nonprofit in downtown Hillsboro,” he said. “[One quarter] of the population is Hispanic. What would it be like if Bag&Baggage was full every night and we had a Spanish-language theater company in downtown? What if the city helped fund professional dance and musical theater companies? Bars would be hugely benefited if there was greater artistic diversity. You want to see Hillsboro grow in terms of being a destination for arts and culture? Start investing in the organizations that reflect the people who live there.”

The city has supported Calle Diez and Latino-owned M&M Marketplace a few blocks from Main, whose director Jaime Miranda is optimistic about downtown’s arts scene. “I feel like the health of downtown is improving,” he said. “I see more investment, good food, more businesses, good activity going on at night.” He too proposes more city efforts, such as guided walks and bike rides, to knit downtown closer to the largely Latino neighborhoods a few blocks away. 

NEW HOME, NEW ENERGY

The night I arrived at my new residence in downtown Hillsboro — after years of living in the heart of Portland’s downtown arts district — the city threw a party, in the pouring rain. Not just for me, but for thousands (at least 10,000, according to Butler) of others thronging the downtown Christmas tree lighting, one of the many festivities Hillsboro Downtown Partnership throws every year. Colorful street lighting and the sounds of the Oregon Chorale brightened the winter gloom.

I moved here because of the vibrancy I’d sensed in visits to arts events over the past few years, a rising young artistic and entrepreneurial energy, a culture of mutual supportiveness (and admittedly, a dash of boosterism), and a demographic that’s much more diverse than my environment during the decade I lived steps away from the Portland Art Museum, Portland State University, Portland’5, The Old Church, and all the rest. It’s a community whose second responders were artists and that dared to put recently arrived artists in downtown civic leadership roles. 

At a moment when other Oregon leaders (especially since the death in 2020 of former Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish) seem to be turning their backs on homegrown arts, Hillsboro is actually turning to fresh new artists and immigrants and asking them to steer the city’s rebirth, spotlighting locally grown art arising from our own cultural hubs, rather than centralized palaces of art catering to national celebrity tours. 

One important lesson Hillsboro can pass on to other cities looking to boost their economies via the arts — it’s not a quick fix. 

“This current chapter of the city’s work in the arts is possible because of decades of achievements, risks, and ongoing contributions of our creative leaders, volunteers, business owners, and champions,” the city’s Harrington said. “We’re grateful that Hillsboro’s focus on equity and community-driven planning has always included a strong focus on the impact of arts and culture. We’ll never stop learning and evolving.” 

Read more stories about Hillsboro arts.

Read more stories about Oregon cultural hubs.