Project Eureka Needs Your Help Beautifying Downtown

Project Eureka Needs Your Help Beautifying DowntownPress release from Project Eureka:

Project Eureka, a volunteer-lead community group, is making the city more beautiful! This spring we are focusing our efforts on one of the most-traveled sections of our city: the 101 corridor through Downtown Eureka (4th and 5th streets between D and H Streets), and we need your help.

You may have already noticed our most recent project: the colorful hanging banners on the light poles along the 101. We have also worked with the City to replace the old style of garbage cans with new garbage and recycling cans throughout Downtown. Next up: we are turning our attention to landscaping, and we’d love your help.

Ready to get involved? There are a few ways you can help create a more beautiful Eureka:

  1. Donate
    We need your help to implement all of the projects we have planned!

  2. Adopt A Plot
    You can single-handedly beautify a piece of this City. We are looking for community members to adopt the tree wells along the 101.

  3. Come to the Community Work Day
    Lend a hand on Saturday, April 24th from 10:00 – 1:00. We will be working on landscaping and cleanup projects, so bring your gloves and any garden tools you have (we’ll also have some available to borrow). Meet at the Eureka Visitor’s Center (240 E Street), and wear your mask.

Visit our website: www.projecteurekaca.com to donate or volunteer today!

And follow us on Instagram to stay up to date: @projecteureka

We have lots of other exciting projects we are rolling out this spring and summer: hanging lights in the street trees, applying vinyl clings with beautiful images to vacant storefronts, rehabbing the benches in Downtown, and hanging baskets full of beautiful flowers.

Why focus on something as “superficial” as beautification with all of the issues facing our area right now? In fact, beautification has a wide array of benefits that improve cities and the lives of the people who live there. City beautification projects have been proven to build neighborhood pride and ownership, and serve as a base for revitalization. Beautification also improves the well-being of residents, encourages more tourism, increases property values, and attracts new businesses.

This project is coordinated by Jenna Catsos (of Pen+PIne and the Eureka Street Art Festival), and Alanna Powell (of the Eureka Visitor Center, Eureka Friday Night Market, and Humboldt Made). Both coordinators are volunteers, not working under any organization or the City of Eureka.  The mission of Project Eureka is to improve the look and feel of the City of Eureka through community-driven beautification and clean-up projects that enhance the visual experience for visitors and residents alike.Project Eureka Needs Your Help Beautifying Downtown

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18 Comments
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Alf
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Alf
2 years ago

No amount of landscaping or decorating will beautify downtown or old town Eureka as long as it is the area most concentrated with the transient population. Each day this group comes in mass to Free Meal at lunch time. If you drive through that area during that time, you will notice that very few put the trash from the meal in a garbage can. Instead it is left right where they finish with it, to be blown around the whole area. If they want a meal it should be on the condition they have a little respect and put all trash in a garbage can. But, yet, it keep happening. If anyone wants to beautify Eureka, let’s start with temporarily shutting down Free Meal until they can find a way to mandate the litter problem comes to an end. Maybe they could provide a meal to those who do dispose of litter properly and send away those who do not.

Although I applaud the efforts of any group of volunteers who want to improve Eureka, it won’t work until the leadership decides to make changes that are necessary with the drugs, transients and other criminal activity. This is the hard work they are paid to do, yet they continue to refuse. Instead, they write and give worthless speeches like our mayor did the whole previous year.

A.C.
Guest
A.C.
2 years ago
Reply to  Alf

You’re delusional if you think depriving mentally ill people of a meal is going to solve the litter problem. Guess what? People will instead go through the trash and spread it around town and still defecate in public spaces cause serving folks a meal isn’t the problem, it’s our county’s abysmal mental health care system :~) At least free meal is providing a service to those whose brains aren’t properly functioning, what are you doing?

cu2morrow
Guest
cu2morrow
2 years ago

wonderful, I,ve lived here for over five decades pencil me in.

Bill
Guest
Bill
2 years ago

Alf, unfortunately I agree with you. Having been born and raised in Eureka, growing up playing and riding bikes all over town, I am biased towards my opinions of what needs to be done. What I have seen is a slow continuous process of allowing this degeneration to spread. I see it with the upkeep of the kiosks that were installed along with sign at the “big turn” from Broadway onto 5th Street. The kiosks have been allowed to literally dissolve in some places, benches removed because of homeless sleeping on them, sign hit so many times it was not replaced.

Camping allowed to take place at the north end of town. If you are ever stopped at the last light in town by Kinkos/Fed Ex, the amount of trash in the bushes should be completely unacceptable. But, it is allowed to accumulate and impact the wetlands in these areas. Tourists see that stuff along with the people sleeping in doorways during the middle of the day!! Don’t our City politicians, City council, Public Works, Parks, Environmental Services, etc. see this crap? Give me a break.

The wetland and greenbelt area below the old school, now a Humboldt County Board of Education building at West Ave and Myrtle was a place that deer and other wildlife used, it was overrun by homeless camps, then fenced off. Now no wildlife can use it, but the homeless have busted open the fence and are camping in there again.

WAKE UP EUREKA, and Humboldt County, continuing to provide support to this group of people and thinking that something is going to change their attitude on life is insanity.

Close to the breaking point Eureka!

North west
Guest
North west
2 years ago
Reply to  Bill

If the tourists flew in they might be surprised but if they drove they already seen plenty of shanty’s along roads or freeway overpasses no matter which way they took to get hear. It’s bad everywhere

Broadway Babe
Guest
Broadway Babe
2 years ago
Reply to  North west

No matter. Eureka is a uniquely and quintisentially shithole of a city and it clearly shows no matter how many “shanty’s” one has gaped proceeding it.

nah
Guest
nah
2 years ago
Reply to  Broadway Babe

Not at all, in fact our community seems to not be as bad off as many others when it comes to homelessness. It seems many of our residents never leave the county and thus have no frame of reference.

M
Guest
M
2 years ago
Reply to  Bill

Bill, nice post.

TDog
Guest
TDog
2 years ago

Eureka needs numerous more “RECOVERY CENTERS”.
and the laws on the books actually enforced!!!!

I like stars
Guest
I like stars
2 years ago

It is sad how big a gap exists between the cool little city Eureka could be and the shithole it actually is.

Mike
Guest
Mike
2 years ago

I know one way how to help beautify Eureka, stop things like this. Today at the intersections of 7th and Myrtle, this guy leaning against the fence taking a crap under his pink towel. Before I got the camera opened, he was wiping his ass. This is what has ruined Eureka’s beauty

Broadway Babe
Guest
Broadway Babe
2 years ago
Reply to  Mike

Hah!
He done public dung in Dung City, aka Eurtweeka. Pathetic but dang funny!

ShaggyDpg
Guest
ShaggyDpg
2 years ago
Reply to  Mike

Gotta have something to lean against so ya can relax.
As for the towel, obviously they felt the need for some privacy.
At least he didn’t moon you.
Lemme guess…you didn’t pick-up the turd to help beautify Eureka?

M
Guest
M
2 years ago
Reply to  Mike

I get what you’re saying mike, but can you imagine how horrible that guys life must be?

sam
Guest
sam
2 years ago
Reply to  M

There are very few public rest rooms these days.

M
Guest
M
2 years ago

1. Give the transients a place to go at the edge of town, (an area away from residences and businesses and apartments, and trails), open up an acre. The devil’s playground group didn’t leave, they just spread out. Historically the edge of town, that’s where they could go and be left alone and they wouldn’t bother anyone. Maybe a mile south of eureka. Each town would have their own area, not just eureka. Provide rehab. for those that want it.

2. Plant trees along Broadway, 5th/4th.

sam
Guest
sam
2 years ago
Reply to  M

Plant trees along Broadway, 5th/4th
Before more trees can be planted, a maintenance agreement has to be signed.

hmm
Guest
hmm
2 years ago

I wonder how much it would cost for the county to actually solve our mental health care / drug abuse problem?

We would need to have enough shelter beds to be able to enforce the no camping ordinance. And the no camping ordinance would have to be strictly enforced.

We would also need a massive facility for in-house, long-term rehabilitation. And this facility would have to be staffed with physicians nurses and others.

To fix the root of the problem we would need jobs. Jobs that don’t come at the cost of our local ecology. Jobs that pay a decent living wage.

And we would need housing. Not just low income housing but more housing of all types, since the cost of rent/mortgage is far out of balance with the average income.

I think all these things are pretty achievable, but not for us. Our nation is too rapidly capitalistic, and none of these improvements will result in short-term profits for publicly traded companies.