Strawberry Festival Update

Dear friends of the Eastside Heritage Center and the Bellevue Strawberry Festival:

With no small amount of sadness, the board of the Eastside Heritage Center has decided not to produce the Bellevue Strawberry Festival in 2019. There is some chance that an outside event producer will pick up the event in the future.

The Bellevue Strawberry Festival has been an unqualified success over the years. In many ways the Eastside Heritage Center has become a victim of that success. As the festival became bigger and more popular, we knew we needed to up our game and professionalize the production to ensure quality, safety and an overall great festival experience. These requirements began to get way out in front of our capacities as a relatively small non-profit community heritage organization.

The success of the Bellevue Strawberry Festival has been due, in large part, to the quality of the vendors, musicians, suppliers, sponsors and other partners we have been able to attract. For your support we thank you. We recognize that the event has a great deal of community and brand equity and that it may be possible to restart it in the future, as the same great festival but with a far smaller role for the Eastside Heritage Center. If anything changes, our loyal friends will be the first to know.

And one last shout-out to Heather Trescases, who built the Strawberry festival from the ground up, and to Lexi and rest of the EHC staff and volunteers who put in so much time and effort to make it a success.

Thank you again for your support, and we hope everyone can fill that weekend with another great event.

Parlor Re-Vamp

Earlier this year, we were temporarily moved out of McDowell House to allow for some maintenance to occur. As with any move, we discovered a lot of things we didn’t know we had or thought we had lost long ago. There was a significant amount of boxing and unboxing. We also had to come to terms with the way we’d been using the space.

As the move back in date approached we had a lot of conversations about how we wanted to maximize our use of this wonderful house and how we could use it to better serve our mission. We decided to convert the parlor from an exclusively research-based space to a multi-use space. This involved relocating a lot of furniture, files, and supplies. In the end we decided to work with folding tables and chairs, so the room can be easily emptied to accommodate programs, events, and other activities.

We also wanted to showcase some of our collections, so we moved in an exhibit cube. We’ll be using this for rotating displays throughout the year, highlighting particular areas of interest for our volunteers, members, and staff.

Finally, we installed some photo ledges to share our various educational boards. These boards are usually brought with us to off-site programs and stored out of the way when not in use. But we thought - why not store them and display them at the same time!

We can’t wait to share the new and improved parlor with you at our upcoming Membership Meeting!