Earthblog

There’s a hub of radical activity at the east end of Laurel Street in Fort Collins. As Garrett Carr describes it, “there’s a whole slew of visions, it’s not just my vision, everyone comes here with a new vision. Primarily this place is just a venue, it’s just a big, empty square and we filled it up with resources. We have tools, we have information books, we have internet, we have different people who come and teach classes and provide information, we have documentary nights to increase awareness.”

I walk east down Laurel. Houses and lots shrink, traffic thins out, and fewer cars line the street. As Laurel comes to an end just shy of Riverside, the zoning shifts and chain link fences guard some garages and dirt lots full of cars to be repaired, trailers, and other equipment. A red truck bounces through a gate kicking up dust and setting off a sort of welcome horn blast.

I continue, heading into an open garage door where a few young guys drift in and out on bicycles or to their vehicles with handfuls of tools. A young woman says hello as she leaves. Welcome to Hammer Time! Projects.

Garrett, one of the founders of Hammer Time!, tells me to look around. The place is clean, organized, labeled. The west wall of the garage backs bookshelves reaching about a dozen feet into the air. The shelves are labeled for borrowing, sometimes with drawings playfully referencing the sections. Edgy philosophy books, books on hippie culture, and other revolutionary movements, other marginalized populations. It’s a good collection.

Garrett says, “a lot of the information we have is a little bit on the radical side. It’s not as prominent. It’s information that’s pushed back. It’s a different view about what’s really going on in the world, stuff people don’t really want you to know about.”

One corner is under construction hoping to be a free store. The south wall is full of cabinets stuffed with milk crates loaded with tools for lending. The rest of the garage is set up for people to drag in projects—broken tables, old chairs—and have what they need to fix them. The space as a whole makes a defiant argument against planned obsolescence.

Hammer Time! is a complicated idea. There’s a Tool Cooperative, the Free School, the Free Store, the Garden, and the InfoShop. There’s a lot going on.

The Tool Co-op itself is a simple idea, as Garrett says, “basically, the goal, or the vision of the place is just to share resources, to share information with people, make it so its a person to person sharing.” Projects come up, furniture, cars, houses, all the things we manufacture break. We could each stock our homes, closets, and garages with all the tools we need, spending money on cheaply built, or even expensive equipment we’ll rarely use, or we can pool our resources, share, and use the crap out of our tools like they were designed to be abused. We can do this together.

“What’s great about the whole person to person sharing is that you get a whole lot more interest,” Garrett says, “when you are at school or the university, which is great, and really important, but you have this structure where you’re sitting down facing a teacher who’s pouring this knowledge into you and it’s rarely interactive. But if you’re learning something from someone who’s your friend, or is really similar to you, you can learn more, interact more”

Here’s a schedule of what they’re up to:

Tool Co-op and Infoshop: Mon, Wed, Sat 12-8pm

Free School: Thursday 6-8pm

Volunteer Meetings: Fridays 6-8pm

Gardening: Saturdays 2-5pm

General Bad-Ass Work Parties: Saturdays 12-8pm

It’s hard to sit in a space this vibrant and know it’s precarious. Hammer Time! is struggling to keep this location. I ask Garrett if it’s hard to talk about this, he says, “it’s so complicated and confusing, there’s a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red-tape.” They’re zoned as Commercial Limited, like an automotive shop, a theater, or a drive-through, but what they’re doing doesn’t really fit that description. It’s deliberately not commercial, and fairly unlimited, but how Garrett sees the place is as more of a Community Center, or perhaps as Light Industry.“We make stuff,” he offers lightly.

These different classifications have requirements in a 1997 law governing land use. Basically, if Hammer Time! were able to keep their current designation everything about the venue, gravel parking lot, lack of sidewalks, certain fire codes, and all are grandfathered in, but if they change their designation as an automotive shop they’d have to invest in changes to bring the space up to the new standards. This would be costly. They’d likely be out of a home.

Garrett is working hard through appropriate means. He’s cooperating and talking with Gary Lopez, a zoning inspector, and getting the support of City Councilman Ben Manvel. It’s both astounding and uneasy to see someone with shelves full of anarchist books have the patience and wherewithal to give the so-called “right channels” a chance. Garrett proves to be sharp and open-mined. He has his vision and he understands the circumstances.

He shows his frustration only in measured observations, “there’s little room for cost-benefit analysis in this process. Right now it’s zoned as an automotive place but it’s doing better in terms of pollution, in terms of traffic, than an automotive place would, but it doesn’t follow these certain guidelines.” With this kind of positive energy I’m curious what Garrett is capable of.  On the 25th Garrett and his friends at Hammer Time! will hear back from the city about what they’ll need to do—I hope it goes well.

This brings us to the cupcakes, Hammer Time! is planning a Cupcake Cook-off to help pay for the place, to help them get started, and to help them keep the place going. The plan is to get anyone, individuals, local business, and so on to get involved in some friendly competition to see who can make the best cupcake. People will pay to taste and judge. People will have fun. As Garrett asks, “who doesn’t love cupcakes?”

The Cupcake Cook-off is set for November 6th, 7-9pm at the Bean Cycle.

It’s hard not to like someone who delights in such a confectionery idea and gets fired-up about his beliefs an instant later. When I ask Garrett about today’s wasteful manufacturing practices he says, “planned obsolescence is shit, it’s really ridiculous” He looks back at the shelves and says, “it’s cool a lot of the tools we get here are super-old, like dead-grandfather-style kind-of-things. Its really great, people have all theses old tools and they don’t know what to do with them. They’re really great and they work better than the new tools. You can fix them up, take them apart, and get them back and running. New tools sometimes don’t even have screws and nuts where you’d need to take them apart. It’s meant to be broken.” When even our tools can’t be repaired there’s a problem.

The Hammer Time! Projects website, www.hammertimeprojects.org, is full of common sense observations like this. They ask “what if one of your neighbors opened their garage doors? What if there was a place that has the perfect size Allen wrench, a place that already has a bunch of wood piled out back that you could build a 5' 3/8" x 2' 3/4" x 4' 15/16" size desk with, a place with a piece of wire that you don't need to ride to Ace buy an entire spool for $7.95, a place you can fix your stool. Where instead of a salesman telling you your stool's crap because it doesn't swivel and wants money, your friends tell you it's crap and give you a hand?”

Their mission aspires to be elegantly transformational and has whole-person and whole-systems undertones. It goes like this: “We strive to promote creativity, reuse, participatory decision making, self-determination, equal forms of exchange, and more meaningful connections with the things we use as well as each other.” I hope these guys succeed.

I notice an old Underwood typewriter displayed on the book shelf, perhaps a #5 from the first two decades of the last century. Garrett says it still works.