The City of Santa Fe is sponsoring a fun and interactive Midtown Block Party as part of its continuing commitment to gather community input on October 23 from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Center, 1600 St. Michael’s Drive. 

To engage the community in sharing ideas about the past and future of Midtown, the Block Party will include food trucks, live music by Edición de Rancho, Lone Piñon, Los Primos Melódicos, and Frontera Bugalú, community mural workshops, a site wide scavenger hunt, a tenant rights clinic, film screenings, a “round robin” community voice filmmaking workshop, a pumpkin patch, artist booths, a raffle, bike giveaways, and other events. Free meal tickets for participants will be provided as well as an opportunity to choose your pumpkin and receive or create your own custom screen print for your Halloween bag. For a schedule of events visit: https://sfai.org/midtown-block-party/.

The site-wide scavenger hunt, created by alumni and previous faculty of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD) will be open to the public starting on October 20, 2021. 

With a new idea about ways to do public engagement, the City of Santa Fe decided to support local community organizations to organize the effort. The City’s public engagement consultant, the UNM Design and Planning Assistance Center (DPAC), was asked to develop a robust engagement process that centers equity and community voices. A key outcome of the public engagement effort is to generate recommendations that will inform plans, uses, governance, community opportunities, and sustainable redevelopment of the Midtown Property. DPAC started the process by assembling a team of community organizations with a shared committment to equity and participatory processes. These Midtown Engagement Partners include Santa Fe Art Institute, Chainbreaker Collective, Earth Care, Littleglobe, and YouthWorks. Additions to this collaboration include the Midtown Activation Partners: Fathers of New Mexico, Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library, La Familia Medical Center, and the Santa Fe Indigenous Center. This robust community collaboration will be participating in the Midtown Block Party. 

“While each of our missions and constituencies are different, the community partners are united in a collective goal to develop pathways to equitable representation so that everyone in our community can fully participate in imagining and manifesting an equitable future for this important site”, says Jamie Blosser, Director of the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Building upon the City’s public planning efforts, the Block Party, and all the work of the Midtown Engagement Partners are focused on engaging the voices and leadership of communities of color, low-income and people who are often not part of public planning processes.

The Midtown Block Party is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and City of Santa Fe.

Mayor Alan Webber says: “We are committed to creating an equitable and sustainable Midtown District. Our communities are diverse, and this engagement process is designed to reach as many people in as many ways and times they are most comfortable with. The future shape of Santa Fe is on the drawing boards right now. This is a rare opportunity for residents to participate in planning the most consequential development of a generation in the life of Santa Fe.”

The Midtown Site at 1600 St. Michael’s Drive is accessible by City transit on bus routes #2, #4, and #5. Visit the City website for route and schedule information. 

For more information about the Block Party contact: media@sfai.org or visit: https://www.midtowndistrictsantafe.com/

To keep informed on the progress of the Midtown Moving Forward project, visit midtowndistrictsantafe.com.