Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
A decade ago, Belleville’s downtown looked a little faded. The town was 187 years old. Strip malls and suburban sprawl had done their damage.
So schoolteacher Patty Gregory handpicked a group of volunteers and put on an art fair. It would be for fine art, she stressed, and it would be the smallest and most exclusive such fair in the country.
Belleville residents nodded politely.
Gregory called the fair Art on the Square, organizing the booths around the gracious old fountain in the middle of the longest Main Street in America. She took flyers and went to art fairs throughout the Midwest, Texas, and Florida, recruiting applicants. “Artists would say, ‘Is this a community that appreciates the arts?’” she recalls, “and I would say, ‘We are the home of the second oldest philharmonic in the nation. Only New York City beats us.’”
Thousands came, many venturing over from St. Louis for the first time in years. Even a BBC reporter showed up—looking for the archbishop of Belleville, for other reasons altogether. “Excuse me, but could you tell me what I’ve stumbled into?” he asked Gregory, and BBC Radio aired her bubbly interview the next week.
In the afterglow, newly confident Belleville residents said the next fair should be bigger...but Gregory refused. She wanted it to be walkable. She wanted people to notice Belleville’s charm.
Soon, Art on the Square was drawing applications from every state and four or five other countries. In 2007, its sales ranked No. 1 in the U.S. in the Art Fair SourceBook. In 2008, an event manager from Disney World asked to come. “She said she wanted to see how a show so small, in a town so small, could become No. 1 in the nation,” says Gregory.
Gregory says the late Dennis Spellmann, former president of Lindenwood University, told her Art on the Square helped seal the decision to open a campus in Belleville. In 2005, Big Daddy’s bar and grill came to downtown Belleville—making sure to open its doors before the fair. Last fall, downtown Belleville won the nationwide Paint the Town competition and got a fresh coat of paint for free.
Gregory recalls seeing one of the artists, a former city planner, watching the fair in awe. “I’m trying to figure this out,” he said. “Is this a community that’s driving an art show, or an art show that’s driving a community?”
“It’s both,” she told him. “I think the two have melded into one.”
