Food, music and fun fare show promise downtown

What do fine art, wine and dining, street-vendor craft and food fare, vintage garage-sale finds, live local music, brewpub and taproom beer, custom street rods and local field and orchard bounty have in common?

One and one thing only: When summer rolls around in McMinnville, they work in harmonic tandem to entice locals and tourists downtown. And as odd as that eclectic mix might seem, it has proven to work.

Individually, none of Mac’s summer draws summon the crowds of the community’s May UFO Festival, which took on an almost magical life of its own after being launched by McMenamins as a Hotel Oregon promotion. But taken together, they serve as a substantial cultural and economic driver for a downtown that has come to be celebrated regionally and even nationally.

The lineup continues to change and evolve, which keeps it fresh. The visitor can not only count on old standbys like Make Music McMinnville, Cruising McMinnville, Lemonade Day and Thursday’s venerable Farmers Market, but also vibrant new additions like the McMinnville Art Festival and Vintage in the Valley Market — staged to great success the past two weekends.

Combined with the McMinnville Downtown Association’s MacFresco weekend street-closings, being staged monthly instead of weekly this year, the varied menu of events helps keep downtown hopping. One can only hope it also keeps cash registers ringing, ensuring many more fun summers in the offing over the coming years.

MacFresco opened the third weekend of June in conjunction with Make Music McMinnville, Pride on Third and the Juneteenth Celebration. It continued the third weekend of July in association with the McMinnville Art festival and concludes next month in association with Lemonade Day, each featuring an array of family activities and live music options along the way.

The mid-July art festival featured more than 50 artists, several of whom agreed to host public demonstrations of works in progress. It was organized by Phil and Holly Juttlestad, who plan to make it an annual fixture of the local summer scene.

The Juttlestads are relatively new to the local art community, but quickly became involved in the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County and its annual Art Harvest Tour. Phil went on to launch Tuesday Art and Coffee, which morphed into the nonprofit ArtWorks, official sponsor of the new art festival venture.

Like Make Music McMinnville, which featured folk, rock, country, pop, blues, classical, alternative, experimental and Americana, the art festival strove to be as broadly inclusive as possible. In addition to paintings, photographs and jewelry pieces, it featured works in paper, glass, ceramic, metal, recyclable and mixed formats.

The organizers even provided opportunities for youngsters to explore their own artistic creativity. Something for everyone was the theme throughout.

Last weekend’s followup Vintage in the Valley street fair, a Saturday-only event also benefiting from sealing off Third Street to auto traffic, took the same basic approach. However, the driver in this case was vintage products of a bygone era, rather than serious works of cutting-edge art.

Many downtown restaurants, shops, tasting rooms, taprooms and brew pubs pushed out into the street to take advantage of the heavy foot traffic as best they could. Some found themselves doing a booming business, but that didn’t seem to keep food vendors working out of booths and trucks from claiming their share of the trade as well.

The vintage street fair was the brainchild of Katie Wennerstrom, owner of the local Vintage on Third shop. It drew more than 100 dealers from as far away as New York.

The aim was to limit booth inventories to items at least 50 years in age, and in the main, vendors seemed to adhere to that. They offered furniture, jewelry, glassware, clothing, knickknacks and all sorts of other vintage goods.

Wennerstrom’s vision was to allow fairgoers a chance to stroll by both street booths and fixed storefronts like hers, free of auto traffic, while also getting the chance to partake of musical performances and food and beverage offerings at their leisure.

At some point in the next few years, McMinnville’s downtown is going to face the challenge of an extensive, disruptive and long-running overhaul, caused by the need to replace underground infrastructure reaching the end of its useful life. Surviving that is going to require every bit of the innovative, something-for-everyone traffic draws our community can create.

It’s encouraging to see locals getting a head start today. That kind of can-do enterprise should serve them in good stead on down the line.