The street where you live should be a place where everybody knows your name.
That’s the idea behind the block party, a social event aimed at helping people get acquainted with their neighbours, with the intended consequence of increasing co-operation and safety in the neighbourhood.
Debbie McLeod has organized a block party on Piedmont Crescent for the last four years. It truly does bring the neighbourhood together, she said.
“I don’t have any family in Alberta so I call my neighbours the Piedmont family,” she said.
McLeod and her neighbours all have each other’s phone numbers and watch out for each other, she said.
“I feel comfortable when I know my neighbours. I can tell them, if I’m going on holidays, to watch the house,” she said.
McLeod and several dozen of her neighbours gathered on their closed off crescent for several hours on Saturday afternoon to chow down on burgers, salad and finger food.
Resident Colleen Chupka said the neighbourhood is more safe and friendly, and she’s gotten to know far more of her neighbours because of the block parties.
“They’re wonderful. Before I started coming I knew maybe one or two neighbours,” she said.
While informal block parties have always been around, the city has been formally involved in helping residents hold them since about 2006, said Colleen Lamble, community development co-ordinator with St. Albert’s Family and Community Support Services program.
The number of registered block parties has increased from 15 that year to 67 this year, she said.
“We’ve got streets in St. Albert that have had block parties for years and years and years,” Lamble said.
The program has really taken off since it began a partnership with the Neighbourhood Watch Association of St. Albert and the St. Albert Citizen’s Patrol Society, Lamble said. These groups supply free hamburgers, hot dogs and buns if residents distribute information about their programs.
The neighbourhood watch group provides neighbourhood-specific crime statistics for organizers to distribute when they’re organizing their parties.
“A lot of people assume they live on safe streets, then they see the statistics and they go ‘wow, I had no idea that all these occurrences were happening near me,’ ” said board member Dale Fetterly. “One of our objectives is to make people aware of the real situation in their area.”
So far this year the groups have provided block partiers nearly 3,700 hamburgers and more than 1,620 hotdogs, he said.
It’s difficult to measure the results of block parties, but feedback from participants is overwhelmingly positive, said Brian Andersen, president of the St. Albert Citizen’s Patrol Society.
“Neighbours, once they have them, they see the benefits and want to continue them for years after,” he said. “It’s one of the best ways, I think, to break down anonymity between neighbours.”
Piedmont Crescent resident Bob Haug said the block party allows a person to get acquainted with neighbours who don’t live next door or across the street, like “the guy that’s four doors down and around the corner.”
“You’re aware of that person. You’ve talked to him. You’ve shaken his hand,” he said.
The Piedmont Crescent neighbourhood is so close that he and his wife aborted a plan to build a new house elsewhere.
“A lot of your home or your house is your neighbours,” he said. “They can make it or break it for you.”
