The Lonely Message Board
By David Albright
Fourth Street was on my list of places I knew had to photograph for this project. The elegant, two story commercial building at 279 4th Street has always caught my eye, and having only ever seen it empty and covered in grime gives it a mystique that embodies both the beauty and potential of downtown Bremerton. But when I came down with my camera, my attention was immediately grabbed by something else.
Nestled along the curving sidewalk sits a community message board and some matching bike racks. Following the lead of the buildings behind them, both go largely unused and unnoticed. The muted but multi- colored palette doesn’t exactly cry out for attention, but the geometric shapes, sturdy metal fabrication and post-modern design details reveal that these aren’t standard issue street furniture.
Around the corner on Pacific Ave, a matching clock is an even more impressive representation of the same aesthetic - clearly cut from the same cloth.
I found out these pieces were installed here as part of a Fourth Street revitalization project in the 1990s. This was the same project that gave us the narrowed, winding street with wide sidewalks and angled parking - a design that fits right in with new-urbanist thinking still popular today and currently remaking the streetscapes of cities around the world. The dominant feature is they include more space for people, and less for cars.
But unlike most places where this progressive street design has been implemented—it didn’t have the intended effect here, and businesses left. Some blamed the towering trees that left the street feeling dark, and others the constricted one-way traffic flow that made it hard to access. Whatever the cause, it left us with a charming and seemingly well designed, but empty street in the heart of our downtown, and one in the planning stages of yet another revitalization project.
Bremerton sometimes feels like a small town living in the shell of a larger city. It has a downtown whose buildings dwarf the scale of the activity that they support. And over the past few decades we’ve made it worse by turning our backs on downtown in favor of the big box stores and fast food chains along 303 and Kitsap Way.
Let’s hope that this time around Bremerton is ready to embrace the changes coming to Fourth Street.
There’s a tragic beauty to this neglected old message board—a thoughtfully designed but already decaying relic of someone who dared to hope for community with this antiquated form of connection. If the next revitalization project does succeed where the last one failed, I hope this sturdy message board that’s waited all these years gets to stick around to see it.
