From Willi’s Seafood to Solful, the place has possibilities
The businesses north of North Street in Healdsburg sometimes find themselves left out of the foot traffic from weekend visitors. “It’s a no-man’s land up here, you know,” said Jim Heid, owner of CraftWork in the Mitchell Center. He may be exaggerating—there’s plenty of traffic to CVS, El Sombrero, a liquor store and Flakey Crème to keep the lot buzzing.
But it’s not the sort of neighborhood a visiting pedestrian shopper might think to explore. That applies to a similar degree to Healdsburg Avenue, and a recognizable but hard-to-define contour of the part of downtown where most tourists just don’t go.
So about a year and a half ago Heid, the outgoing Buzz Korth of Maison Smith, Rose Jimenez of Costeaux Baker and other business owners tried to figure out a way to attract more foot traffic. Maybe a clever name would help—some neighborhood branding.
The unifying principle was that it should represent the “North of North Street” area, which naturally led to the NONO district. That wasn’t quite what they had in mind, and after a bit more workshopping they came up with NoMAD, the North Makers Arts District.
They made their presence known last week with the installation of 20 double banners hanging downtown, with a colorful, bold graphic logo NoMAD and almost-familiar quotes about the spirit of exploration. Like “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer” and “A journey is best measured by friends rather than miles.”
It was, as Heid described it, low-hanging fruit: “… just doing a banner campaign on this end of town. The city already has the banner poles there. They don’t get used very much.”
Buzz Korth, who with his wife Janen runs the modern mercantile Maison Smith next door to Myra Hoefer Design, said: “We had a very simple goal. Increase foot traffic where people aren’t wanting to go.”
Founding partners include Maison Smith as well as Heid’s CraftWork business space, Eric Drew’s Sotheby’s International Healdsburg and 27 North, Bill Foley’s former Hotel le Mars. They also have different membership levels for other businesses, reminded Korth.
North to Alaska?
The concern with “activating” the north of North corridor has come up before. It was one of Piazza Hospitality’s arguments for the hotel it plans at 400 Healdsburg Ave. More recently some hand-wringing took place over the borders of the downtown area in the Measure M ballot measure, the same city blocks included. Are they part of downtown or not?
It’s all about where the foot traffic goes, and where it doesn’t go. And a no-no for foot traffic is the relative untidiness of the east side of the Healdsburg Avenue block between North and Piper. Two eyesores book-end the block: Piazza’s own parking lot and tarnished office, and a long-closed gas station surrounded by a shabby scrim.
Across the street, on the other hand, the block from Willi’s Seafood & Raw Bar to the Solful dispensary provides a more satisfying meander, past a shoe-repair and a barbershop, art galleries and tasting rooms, all inviting for visitors, aside from the anomalous interruption of WC Sanderson Ford.
Yet Sanderson, too, is among the NoMAD members, a diversified list of over 40 businesses in food and wine, the arts, home and design, lodging, services and lifestyle.
“We took a high road that said everybody in the districts is in NoMAD, regardless of whether they pay into it or not,” Heid said. “There will be QR code stickers that will go on everybody’s window that’ll drive people to the website” at nomadhealdsburg.com.
Aside from the low-hanging banners and a website, what else might NoMAD bring to town? “Longer-term goal is to do some events. Maybe we do something that just kind of celebrates the district or do something special,” Heid said. He’s the current chair of the Urban Land Institute, a community builder and popular author in the field.
He’s been down this neighborhood-branding road before, and is relatively laissez-faire about it. “We’ll figure out what else we do,” he said. “So it’s in some ways organic, grass roots starting with branding and then ideally leading to some other things.”
An earlier extrapolation of the name NoMAD was North Mercantile, not North Makers. But given the number of galleries and creatives among the stores in the compact neighborhood, the trendy noun was embraced.
“It feels so good it has the word ‘makers’ in the name,” said Jennifer Hirshfield of Gallery 300. “There’s lots of shopping and selling, but we make art, we make bread, we make wine.”
Her gallery is located on the oft-walked, rarely spoken Mitchell Lane, between Healdsburg Avenue and the parking lot on Center Street. She’s next door to another NoMAD business, Drewish Deli—they make bagels.
