Arts in the Park

As mentioned earlier, every summer, the Yukon Art Society puts together Arts in the Park. Monday through Friday performers stand on stage in LePage park in downtown Whitehorse during the lunch hour and perform.
Today it was the Debbie and Bruce Bergman, playing a lot of bluegrass. Thoroughly enjoyable.

LePage Park began in 1985/6 when Heritage Canada was promoting downtown revitalization. I worked for Target Downtown in the small blue house that you can barely see in the photo below. It was in the process of being renovated as a Heritage House (The Smith House). The white house you see is another heritage house (The Captain Martin House). We started a park between the two houses and it slowly developed into what you see above. It is well used and a very pleasant place to eat your lunch.


For those of you who once lived in or visited Whitehorse, there's one of our two theatres across the road.
This is also the stage the White Stripes performed at a couple of years ago when they came to Whitehorse and decided to put on a free concert. They discovered they were playing that evening in a facility that held only 500 people and heard that a lot of people couldn't get tickets, so they phoned a radio station to announce an impromptu concert at 4 and word spread like wildfire. There must have been close to 1,000 people that came to the park, spreading onto the streets to watch them.
And speaking of wildfires, a forest fire closed the Alaska Highway today between Ft. St. John and Watson Lake. Fireside and a couple of other stops were evacuated. The highway is our lifeline with trucks carrying our food and materials north. Hopefully it is soon under control.