PREVIOUSLY: FIRE HYDRANT ART in ARCATA?! The City is Looking to Add Some Color to G and H Streets and Wants Your Input

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You may have noticed that many of the fire hydrants around Arcata have been gettin fresh, colorful new ‘fits. That’s because the City of Arcata decided it was time to give the drab downtown hydrants a makeover, and after putting out a call for local artists in February, the project is finishing up this week. 

Twenty hydrants were painted along G and H Streets and Eighth and Ninth Streets by 21 different local artists whose design ideas were selected by a content review panel. At this point, most of the hydrant murals are complete, though a couple of artists are still finishing up their work this week. 

The project is a collaboration between the City of Arcata and Playhouse Arts, and is a part of Arcata’s efforts to beautify and bolster economic recovery in the downtown area. Funding for the project came out of $4.4 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds awarded to the City in 2021 to help relieve the financial burden brought on by the COVID pandemic.

Map showing the fire hydrant art locations and he artists that completed each one

The Arcata City Council set aside a chunk of that money to go toward beautifying the downtown area, particularly G and H Streets north of the Arcata Plaza. The idea behind prioritizing these streets is that they serve as the main corridor between Cal Poly Humboldt and downtown and are thus many students’ and visitors’ primary impression of the town. 

In a previous interview with the Outpost, Emily Benvie, Arcata’s deputy director of community and environmental services, said that the project was partially inspired by  Eureka’s utility box art program, where different artists were commissioned by businesses to revamp the city’s unsightly utility boxes. Arcata city staff chose to have fire hydrants painted instead of utility boxes because there are a lot of them downtown, many of them were looking pretty shabby, and they are small and relatively easy to paint. Unlike Eureka’s program, the artists were paid from the grant funding, rather than sponsored by businesses. 

To highlight the project’s completion, Playhouse Arts and the City compiled a nice little map that shows where each of the painted hydrants is located and which artist completed each piece. 

The City of Arcata, Playhouse Arts and the local artists will be celebrating the completion of the project this Saturday, Oct. 7 on the Arcata Plaza, between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Brochures contain the map, and other information about the fire hydrant project will be available for you to take. So, after you check out the pastel artists doing their thing, you could take yourself on a fire hydrant art tour!