Do you like bouncy castles? How about eating a questionably cooked hamburger while standing in the middle of your street, cars be damned? Do you yearn to meet your neighbour who no one really ever sees, living in that weird house at the end of your street?
Yes? Then you should host a block party!
Block parties are increasingly becoming popular annual events in many Vancouver neighbourhoods. The whole point of these summer street fiestas is to get you out of your home to meet your neighbours, which thereby helps foster a community that watches out for each other, which in theory makes your neighbourhood a safer and friendlier place for everyone. Makes sense, right?
In Vancouver, there’s a whole official process if you want to hold a block party. This year, my wife took it on with gusto, even though I weakly protested at the potential social awkwardness of it all. Can’t we just invite our friends over? Apparently, I was missing the point. Jill applied anyway, and quite easily received a modest grant from the City to help pay for food and supplies, and I found myself reluctantly off to the block party races.
Our street is already extremely festive to begin with. Halloween and Christmas are huge, carnival-like events, so it should have come as no surprise to us that there was already a yearly summer party, just one block down from us, and it was apparently a blockbuster. When my wife clued in to the competition, she tried to coordinate the calendar to make it a double decker block party, but the dates didn’t work out; we’d be out of town for theirs. I tried to convince Jill to cancel, but she was having none of it: she perilously planned our block party to be a just week later.
From all accounts that other annual block party was a massive hit. Closed off streets, a trampoline, police cruisers and fire trucks for the kids to marvel at, live bands, glorious, locally sourced food, and a joyously packed street. It was apparently the perfect summer block party. My wife was suddenly feeling the pressure.
Jill decided to downsize, centralizing our “block party” to essentially our front yard and sidewalk outside the house, inviting every neighbour on our block to enjoy our very own questionably cooked hamburgers along with their potluck surprises, accompanied by a series of intimate musical performances on our front deck.
In the end, we didn’t have any barricades to shut the street down, or a bouncy anything, or any pre-arranged visits by authority figures (where I come from the last thing you’d ever want to do is actually invite cops to your party).
But our neighbours did come out of their homes, and they did gather under the warm setting summer sun on the sidewalk and in our front yard to meet, greet, eat, and help form the community that in our hearts we all want to belong to: a great neighbourhood. And it really wasn’t that awkward at all. Go for it!
