Reviving the arts

It’s easy in small towns to view arts and cultural events as luxuries. But as a growing number of small communities in the U.S. have discovered, the arts can be a key element in community and economic revival. Rural parts of the country are undergoing profound changes and in many small towns, the arts have proven to be a way of sparking new economic opportunity for resident artists, retailers, and performers. Perhaps most importantly, the arts are a way of creating a fuller and healthier community, the kind that provides a quality of life that attracts talented new residents.

The Blandin Foundation frequently lists the eight dimensions of a healthy community, and cultural opportunities are right up there with basic infrastructure as a critical component of communities with a viable future.

That’s why we’re excited by this week’s groundbreaking for the Lake Vermilion Cultural Center, in Tower. We believe this new facility will be a centerpiece of a cultural revival for a community that’s struggled in this area for some time.

One hundred years ago, the arts flourished in Tower-Soudan. On any given Saturday night, one could take in a performance at the local opera house, watch a play at the Finnish Temperance Hall, or hear music from any of a dozen different community bands and orchestras that came and went over the years.

For Tower-Soudan, it’s a classic example of going back to the future, as the community is set to relocate the former St. Mary’s Episcopal Church—the oldest church building north of Duluth— to Tower’s Main Street, where it will play an important role in advancing the community’s future. The center, thanks to the outstanding efforts of the cultural center’s board and their indefatigable leader Mary Batanich, has raised more than $200,000 over the past few years to move the church to its new location across Main Street from the civic center. Besides restoring this spectacular and historic church building, the cultural center will include newly-constructed additions, including offices, a lobby and art gallery, a community kitchen, rehearsal space and the main performance space. It will be a multi-use facility that will be open for a wide range of musical performances, plays, exhibitions, weddings, and many other related uses.

And located just a block from the city’s new harbor development, the cultural center will be an important attraction for harbor users.

Facilities such as this can remake a community, by injecting real vitality, and creating opportunities for spin-off artistic events, limited only by imagination. The arts bring diversity to our local economies and they are critical to creating the high quality of life residents here desire, and potential new residents will expect.

We’ve already seen the vitality that arts and culture have brought to places like Ely, where artists abound and where performance of all kinds is increasingly embedded in much of community life. Tower-Soudan still has a way to go, certainly, but this week’s groundbreaking was a very welcome step toward a bigger and brighter future for the arts in this community. We’ll all be watching with interest as the project proceeds.