Hickory’s SALT Block is a Culture Hub
Published May 27, 2009
Kristina Allen talks up the Hickory Museum of Art.
No matter what your taste, the SALT Block in Hickory offers so much variety, you’ll likely be licking your lips for more.
A focal point of culture, the SALT Block offers everything its acronym of a name suggests – Science, Art and Literature Together.
On one block sits the Catawba Science Center, the Hickory Museum of Art, the Hickory Public Library, the Western Piedmont Symphony, the United Arts Council of Catawba County and the Hickory Choral Society.
“It is just very unique,” says Kathryn Greathouse, co-executive director of the United Arts Council, likening the site to a small-town version of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.
The block’s anchor is the iconic former Claremont High School, built in 1925 and transformed 60 years later into the 75,000-square-foot Arts & Science Center of Catawba Valley.
Science and art under one roof was a rare idea in the 1980s, but the concept caught on, with donations quickly exceeding expectations.
The center allows tenants such as the highly respected Hickory Museum of Art, the first museum of American art in the Southeast, to stay rent free, letting the organization focus on its primary cultural mission, Greathouse says.
In 1999, the city of Hickory received donated land on the northwest corner of the block that became the site of the Patrick Beaver Memorial Library. The state-of-the-art facility was another drawing card for the cultural corridor, and the “literature” addition resulted in the adoption of the SALT Block name.
Most recently, the block has grown again with the science center adding fresh- and saltwater aquariums and a 30-foot domed planetarium, which is equally good for movies that explore space or laser shows that are set to Pink Floyd.
“The science center typically brings in a younger crowd than the art museum normally caters to,” says Kristina Allen, communications manager of the art museum, which is famous for its Southern Contemporary folk art. “We can follow on their coattails and bring their people to our side.”
The success of the SALT Block is widely heralded as both a cultural center and as an economic force that makes Hickory more attractive to newcomers. Each year more than 200,000 people visit the block, not counting those going to the library, Greathouse says.
The block is scheduled to grow further under a multiyear capital campaign to renovate the old West Wing building into offices for the organizations, classrooms for the science center and new rehearsal space for the symphony, Greathouse says.
“You have to keep offering new things to stay relevant,” she says. “This block has just done a great job of that.”
Story by Sam Scott
Photo by Ian Curcio
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