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by Dan Mac Alpine
The traffic on Central Street normally wooshes past outdoor diners at the Heart & Soul Cafe at the corner of Central and Market streets, making diners duck a little lower behind the traffic barriers the select board mandated to keep them safe.
Heart & Soul owners Julie and Bud Siciliano had an idea that would both protect their patrons and take advantage of the passing traffic: Paint the concrete traffic barriers, also called Jersey barriers, to convey their café’s message of peace, love, and harmony and to reflect the area’s natural beauty and its proximity to the sea.
“It’s a calm space,” Bud says. “It was a chance to get out our branding and to paint the barriers.”
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The painted barriers will be used in coming years as well, assures Bud.
Good food, small location
Heart & Soul is small. The café seats about 30 people inside and another 40 outside from April to the end of November. It’s open most days for breakfast and lunch and adds live music (as well as a Friday dinner service) at the weekend.
Its fruit waffles, pancakes, and sandwiches that have all praised by the Phantom Gourmet, an area foodie program.
Art serves to decorate
Artist Sunil Gulab, whose work can also be seen in Danvers and other local communities, festooned the normally gray concrete traffic barriers with orange, yellow, red, green, purple, and — of course — ocean blue.
Gulab painted the main barrier with the café’s logo, a heart shape in the front center, and painted the Heart & Soul mustard-yellow VW microbus, the café’s mascot, on the back center.
A line of ocean blue underpins the painting on the barrier.
A single barrier, rising from the street like a tooth, bears Gulab’s yellow flowers.
“We’re going to have tie-dye tablecloths,” Julie says of their table coverings.
Site makes little difference
The café’s location, at the intersection of Central, North Main, South Main and Market streets, makes it a prime location both for a café and a statement. But the site has little to do with barriers and the colors on the barriers, say Julie and Bud.
The husband-and-wife duo said they would have done the same thing if the café were further down Market Street or on Route 1. The point was to beautify the space and to reflect the town — period.
Town officials, Cynthia August Images and Photography (just upstairs from Heart and Soul), and Ipswich Cultural Council also had hands in bringing business and art together, and Bud specifically thanked town officials for helping to facilitate painting the barriers.
Bud and Julie planned the barriers as a way out of current political upheaval and division within the country and a peaceful space amidst pedestrians passing by, often walking their dogs, and the street traffic.
For Bud, especially, the painted barriers belong not just to the café but to the town and to the country.
“It’s not just our little café, but what we’re trying to promote,” he says.
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