Neighborhood Yoga and Local Preservation in Boone, North Carolina--Valerie Midgett

Interview with Valerie Midgett was conducted by Willard Watson in Kindly Kitchen at Neighborhood Yoga in Downtown Boone, North Carolina, for the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, in conjunction with the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition "The Way We Worked."

Who are you, When and where were you born?
"My name is Valerie Midgett, and I was born in 1964, just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania."

How long have to worked there?
"Neighborhood Yoga opened in Boone, 12 years ago, almost exactly 12 years ago. We literally opened in my backyard, that’s why it’s called Neighborhood Yoga. We built a small studio at the top of the hill in my back yard, which is just a block from downtown and started there. We started with a conditional use permit and just taught a few classes, had a couple of teachers besides myself really small intimate classes, and over the years it has grown and we outgrew the space and if we really wanted to grow into a bigger business and reach more people we needed to move out of the neighborhood and really become a part of the downtown community. And that is what we did two years ago, we renovated this building, which is a 100- year-old building and moved into this space.

It was a space that wasn’t really used because when they kind of reinvented the hardware store below, it was a family owned business and still is. For 80 years it was Farmer’s Hardware and when it closed down the boys, the grandsons of the original founder of Farmer’s Hardware opened it up as kind of emporium shops. They wanted to keep the business and how can we appeal to a need, which was tourists – so that’s what they opened. But this third floor was really underused; it was an underused space in Downtown Boone, and that was a real interest of mine in finding underused spaces and reinventing them, and trying to hold true to some of the original architecture that’s here but at the same time update it for my needs. It was an interest of mine and to also have a place for people to gather, local people, not just tourists downtown..."

Read the complete transcript below. 

Tags: BHS-work, BHS-Main-Street, BHS-Job-You-Had

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