At Large in Ballard by Peggy Sturdivant

I'm not usually in Ballard on the last Friday in August so until last year I wasn't aware that I was missing a party at the end of my block. On the last Friday afternoon in August the Ballard Community Center hosts a neighborhood barbeque. Last summer I heard jazz music and followed it to the source at 6020 28th NW. Free hotdogs and ice cream, a chance for the summer camp counselors to "dunk" their counselors, an inflated jumping booth for little kids, and live jazz.

I shouldn't have been surprised. There are always activities at the Ballard Community Center, from the Daddy-Daughter Dance in February to the flashlight Easter Egg Hunt in April. On any given day there are classes in the pottery studio, yoga in the big room, basketball or volleyball in the gym, Dandelion Dance or the after-school or summer camps that are always completely filled and spill out into the park. Bands practice, musicians teach piano and trombone, families gather for movie night and five precincts trudge in to vote there on Election Day.

When I moved to the neighborhood in 1988 there was only the Adams Elementary School scheduled for demolition and replacement. In 1989 the Ballard Community Center was completed next to the Adams construction and welcomed the neighbors with Seattle Parks Department speeches and a giant sheet cake. The adjoining fields and the activity rooms have been almost constantly booked ever since.

Earlier in the month a banner stretched across the entrance on the parking lot side of the Community Center announcing Ice Cream Sundae Night - Tuesday, August 6th from 6:30-8:00 p.m. Then I watched as a pre-teenagers delivered flyers along our street. The black and white announcement read, "Meet old and new neighbors...talk about block watches, crime, and the neighborhood... Or just have a sundae!" The event was scheduled to coincide with the National Night Out program that is now sponsored by Target stores on the first Tuesday of August.

I sauntered down to the Community Center to get more information - meanwhile carrying my invitation. A boy waiting to use the desk phone saw my flyer and said, "What does your house look like? I might have been the one who delivered that."

Eventually the Assistant Coordinator Robert Wilkens and I chatted. He said that something had just prompted him to plan a neighborhood social on the National Night Out date. Given that there was no Target location in the neighborhood he hadn't asked them for any funding; the event would be funded by their governing group the Ballard Community Center Advisory Group. Just as they fund the end of summer barbeque.

The middle school campers had been dispatched to deliver invitations one block out from the community center on each side. Robert Wilkens told me, quite unnecessarily, that Ballard is seeing an influx of high-density housing. He feels the Ballard Community Center is the "ear to the neighborhood" and needs to help the older and newer residents meet on common ground. The community center has always offered a huge variety of programs, if anything it will continue to explore ways to build community in a changing neighborhood.

Throughout Ballard on the National Night Out, and in neighborhoods all over the city, signs went up to close the streets and people gathered. It was a particularly gray night for August, one that sent me looking for a jacket for the first time in two months before I went down to the ice cream social. I saw a few of my neighbors with small children but otherwise it was fairly quiet. "We didn't advertise this much," Robert told me, while Gino, the man behind all of the jazz events, bellowed to the surrounding blocks, "Free Ice Cream!"

Most days the Ballard Community Center is overflowing with groups - mothers checking their toddlers while they participate in the exercise class, back-to-back basketball tournaments, the march of the kids' camps all over Ballard in the summer in matching t-shirts. But on the chilly Tuesday night in August the outside tables were mostly empty, the big vats of ice cream from the Cash n' Carry would be stored back in the freezer until delighting the campers on the following day.

It was perhaps the one night of the year when the Ballard Community Center didn't need to take the lead on community building. That was happening on other streets. But the Ballard Community Center would be ready on almost all of the other days of the year, for 4-H meetings and teenage drop-in. And with any luck the sun will be shining on August 31st as the jazz music wafts through the neighborhood, the campers take aim to dunk their counselors and the community gathers on common ground at Ballard Community Center's annual summer barbeque.

Peggy's e-mail is atlargeinballard@yahoo.com She writes additional pieces for the P.I.'s Ballard Webtown at http://blog.seattlepi.