SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
You may be familiar with the Little Free Libraries - the take-a-book, leave-a-book exchanges. But in Portland, Oregon, that idea is expanded to include mug swaps, trinket exchanges, mini-art galleries. There's even a map to find it all. OPB's Crystal Ligori reports.
CRYSTAL LIGORI, BYLINE: It's a sunny summer day in southeast Portland, and 6-year-old Louis and his mom, Stephanie O'Leary, are inspecting a group of plastic dinosaurs positioned on the fence line of a yard.
LOUIS: This is my second favorite dinosaur.
STEPHANIE O'LEARY: Yeah. What kind of dinosaur is that?
LOUIS: I forgot.
LIGORI: The Dino Exchange is just one of the pieces of Sidewalk Joy in the yard of artist Rachael Harms Mahlandt. Sidewalk Joy is just what it sounds like - yard installations created to bring joy. She started making her own after seeing similar creative offerings in other people's yards.
RACHAEL HARMS MAHLANDT: Coming across these installations was really inspiring for me. My kids loved it, obviously. We would, like, squeal with delight.
LIGORI: Now, her yard has nearly a dozen installations, like a mug swap, a teeny, tiny library where the miniature books are kept behind a silver door no bigger than a light switch cover and a hedgehog adoption station.
HARMS MAHLANDT: So it's actually just the - you know, the puff on a pussy willow branch...
LIGORI: Yeah.
HARMS MAHLANDT: If - you can draw a little face and a little body on it, and then you got a little tiny hedgehog.
LIGORI: As a self-proclaimed steward of Sidewalk Joy, Harms Mahlandt didn't just want people to see the installations in her yard.
HARMS MAHLANDT: I would just see someone come by and start telling them about the other spaces in town that they might get a kick out of. And then somebody finally suggested, you know, there should be a map of spaces like this.
LIGORI: So along with another artist, she started compiling all the locations she could find, creating the PDX Sidewalk Joy map in 2023. Today, the online map has over a hundred different locations.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC BOX PLAYING BEETHOVEN'S "FUR ELISE")
LIGORI: At one, you'll find 10 tiny hand-crank music boxes mounted along a fence. At another, a vintage candy machine dispenses 50-cent prizes, like temporary tattoos, a light-up jelly ring, rock facts or a daily fortune.
(SOUNDBITE OF CANDY MACHINE DISPENSING PRIZE)
LIGORI: Oh, something fell down.
Then there's the Wishing Tree, which is covered in palm-sized note cards, scrawled with people's wishes. Some of the cards are weathered, smeared and unreadable, while others seem written that day.
"I wish to continue with school without having to worry about money problems." This person's wish just says, "To make more art." "I wish for the ability to feel love again." Oof.
The map just gives you the cross streets, not exact addresses. So sometimes, finding things is a challenge, like Jurassic Blooms - a set of little plastic dinosaur vases that hold flower bouquets.
I might be out of luck. I found it (laughter). I found it. I found it. Oh, this is part of the joy, I think. The hunt is part of the joy.
Rachael Harms Mahlandt says people from all over the world have used the Sidewalk Joy map.
HARMS MAHLANDT: I kept getting messages from people who were either visiting from far away, like visitors from Japan, Australia, stuff like that, coming to see the scene we had here, or people messaging me, saying, I created something like this based on what I heard about in Portland.
LIGORI: So last summer, she made a worldwide map so people all over the globe can share in their community's creativity.
For NPR News, I'm Crystal Ligori in Portland.
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