The New Mural on H Street Is Already Changing How Lettered Streets Walks

Walk the corner of H and Halleck this month and you will see it before you register what you are looking at: a wash of red, teal and sandy gold spread across the pavement, shells and starfish tucked into a loose collage pattern. From the sidewalk it reads as decoration. From above, the red pieces resolve into a single letter: H. That is the trick built into Lettered Streets' first street mural, and it is the kind of detail that only makes sense once you know the story behind it.

The mural went in on July 11, during a block party called Letterfest, and it has quietly turned one unremarkable intersection into the closest thing this neighborhood has to a plaza.

What actually happened on July 11

Letterfest was not a city production. It was organized by the Lettered Streets Neighborhood Association, with resident Brian Russell as the point person, and it ran from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. across two blocks of H Street between Jenkins and Logan. The day stacked several small events into one afternoon: an H Street Market of food, music and craft vendors, a 1 p.m. Lemonade Crawl hosted by Smart Trips where every stand offered something for a dollar, and a 2 p.m. ice cream social where neighbors got a free cone and stuck around for yard games. Bellingham Bike Valet donated free bike parking at H and Kearney for the day, its first year doing so.

The mural painting sat in the middle of all of it. Local illustrator Lydia Dahl sketched the design and led neighbors through the coloring, and the result became the neighborhood's first piece of public art painted directly into a street. Dahl built the composition as a collage of smaller, easy-to-paint pieces specifically so a crowd of non-artists could finish it in an afternoon, and she hid the letter H in the arrangement of red shapes as a nod to the street it sits on.

Russell had been pushing the idea for about two years before it came together. His reasoning was less about art for its own sake and more about what a busy street corner does to the people who live near it. He told the Bellingham Herald he wanted the mural to slow down drivers and brighten the intersection, and he framed it as something bigger than paint: a bet that shaping a shared space changes how people feel about the place they live. The project came together in a little over two months once Whatcom Community Foundation's Project Neighborly grant program approved $4,000 in funding.

A mural built to be looked at twice

What makes the H Street mural different from a generic crosswalk art project is that it was designed with two audiences in mind: the driver at eye level, who sees a colorful sea-life pattern that signals "slow down, this is someone's street," and the person who eventually notices the hidden H from a porch roof, a drone photo or a neighbor's phone. Dahl said after the paint dried that the day surprised her, and the feedback she kept hearing was some version of wanting more of exactly this.

Russell has already said he wants to keep going, adding more murals along Halleck Street as it crosses the other lettered avenues, each one with its own hidden letter worked into the design. If that happens on anything like the timeline this one did, expect the next one within the year.

Why one corner is already sticking

Block parties end. What is more interesting here is how much of Letterfest's footprint has stayed put after the event broke down. The ice cream social was staged at the mural itself, not at a park or a rented hall, which means the corner is now the default answer to "where do we meet" for at least one neighborhood tradition. The Lemonade Crawl route ran between H and Kearney, the same stretch where the bike valet set up, so the corner did triple duty as starting line, meeting point and parking lot in a single afternoon. None of that was accidental. Russell's stated goal was to change how the space functions day to day, not just to decorate it for one Saturday.

If you live within a few blocks, this is worth paying attention to for a simple reason: informal gathering spots in a neighborhood like this one do not usually appear this fast. Most of the fixed points people orient around here took decades to earn that status.

The rest of the walk this corner connects to

The mural sits close to two other fixtures that already anchor daily life in Lettered Streets, and together they explain why a single painted intersection can carry this much weight.

A few blocks away, the Old Village Trail runs through the neighborhood on its way between Maritime Heritage Park and Elizabeth Park, marked by green wayfinding signs that also carry short histories of the buildings the trail passes. Along the way it goes by the Pickett House, generally considered Bellingham's oldest building, and past the Bellingham Theatre Guild. Climb Bancroft Street and you get a view down onto Old City Hall. One recent account of walking the route described it as a near car-free way to get downtown, preferable to fighting traffic on Dupont Street, and noted the walk from end to end takes under twenty minutes one way.

The other anchor is older still. Lettered Streets Coffeehouse opened in 2007, when owners Anna Dean and Kjirstin Glessner took over a coffee shop space inside the Pickett Building, a structure dating to around 1890. Dean has described the draw of the place in plain terms: people move away from the neighborhood and come back because they missed it. That kind of pull is hard to manufacture. It is built one regular customer, one slow morning, one familiar face behind the counter at a time.

What the mural adds to this picture is a third point on the map, one that did not exist two months ago and now already has foot traffic, a story, and a plan for expansion. Lettered Streets has always been a place people navigate on foot between fixed points. It now has one more, and this one was built by the people who live here rather than inherited from a developer or the city.

What to watch for next

If you want to see the mural before more of them show up along Halleck Street, the intersection of H and Halleck is an easy stop on a walk that could also take in the Old Village Trail and a coffee at 1001 Dupont Street. Keep an eye on the Lettered Streets Neighborhood Association's calendar for updates on where and when the next mural might land. Given how fast this one came together once the grant funding was in place, it would not be surprising to see another by next summer.

None of this changes the zoning, the schools or the housing stock in Lettered Streets. What it does is give a neighborhood that already prized its walkability one more reason to stay on foot a little longer. That is a small thing until you notice how many small things like it are stacked up in a few square blocks north of downtown.

If you are thinking about what it is actually like to live in a neighborhood like this one, day to day rather than on a map, Michelle Harrington has spent more than two decades getting to know the corners of Whatcom County that do not show up in a listing description. Reach out anytime you want a local read on a neighborhood before you start looking at houses in it.