Page 12 - BusinessWest October 17, 2022

North Adams
Continued from page 9
Creative Businesses Surging
In 2015, Lamb founded the NAMAZING Initia- tive, a community-based organization focused on increasing the lovability of North Adams through creative placemaking in an effort to drive organic economic development. Through the effort, he and his team created points of excitement and attraction to get people to invest and look at what they could do in downtown North Adams.
“Now it’s the businesses themselves that are self-propelling,” he said. “If you see a cool busi- ness and then you see a vacant storefront next door, you want to be in that space next door to them.”
“If you see a cool business and then you see a vacant storefront next door, you want to be in that space next door to them.”
With the help of 1Berkshire, NAMAZING was able to directly invest and help set up pop- up shops to help small, niche businesses have a space on their own until they could hit the ground running.
For example, Walla-Sauce and Conscientious Cloth, two young businesses, are co-sharing a common space. Lamb explained that, with the resources provided to start up an operation for a
three-month stint, they were able to extend their lease past the three months because they’re see- ing enough business and revenue to do that.
“The First Fridays program that’s been going on over the summer — that’s spearheaded by two downtown property and business owners that wanted to see that sort of activity on a monthly business — really catalyzed something exciting over the past year,” he added. “And when you look at all of those opportunities, it also draws more attention to downtown.”
Anna Farrington, creator of First Friday events, owner and primary curator of Installation Space, and owner and principal designer at Anna Far- rington Arts & Design, teamed up with Andrew Fitch to work on closing Eagle Street in downtown North Adams to specifically draw people to the local businesses.
Last spring, Farrington thought there was something missing downtown after the end of Down Street Art, hosted by MCLA; street art was starting to draw crowds at this time. Other com- munities like Pittsfield, Brattleboro, and Boston had a First Friday events program in place and had a lot of positive feedback. She then went business to business downtown and asked if and how they might participate in the First Friday events. Unanimously, the response was “yes, let’s do it.”
“First Fridays is a grassroots initiative; that means businesses participate at a level in which they’re comfortable,” Farrington told Business- West. “And the gallery [Installation Space] has been instrumental in helping to organize some of the First Friday events.”
Installation Space was opened five years ago to provide a space for installation artists where
Anna Farrington says First Fridays are bringing out lots of locals, as she had hoped.
Photo by Ben Lamb
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