Students begin job of painting Valentine hearts
LOVELAND>> Preparations for the annual tradition of hanging red hearts across the city for Valentine’s Day has begun, as Thompson Valley High School students began painting the custom- ordered decorations Monday and Wednesday evenings.
The tradition allows residents to order a custom- painted heart bearing a personal message, often for a loved one, which will then be hung from light poles on Eisenhower Boulevard, U. S. 287 and other streets around Loveland.
A limited supply of the hearts is available, in large part because there are a limited number of street lights from which to hang the hearts and because city engineers have to inspect each one to ensure that it can sustain the extra wind pressure resulting from the hearts.
This year the 350 available hearts sold out in seven hours, according to event organizer TJ Julien.
Julien and two other members of the Thompson Valley Rotary Club, which sponsors the event, stayed up all night processing orders, she said, ensuring billing information was correct and removing streets that had sold out of spots from the list of available locations, she said.
The difficulty of arranging the program every year is hard to overstate, she said, and the city’s involvement is crucial. City workers put up the hearts across the city, ensure that each streetlight pole can bear the load, and remove the hearts after Valentine’s Day so that they can be repainted and reused the next year.
“We’ve had a number of other Rotaries from across the country reach out to us asking how they can emulate us,” Julien
said. “But it’s nearly impossible without the city’s help.”
She expects the hearts to begin appearing on streetlights sometime in January, as soon as crews get a chance to install them.
The students doing the painting are all from Thompson Valley High School, and most of them are members of the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society.
Mary Liakas, a senior at Thompson Valley and president
of the National Honor Society there, said she has painted hearts the past three years, most of them in some way impacted by the pandemic. There were times when she would be painting hearts all by herself, she said.
“It feels really successful this year,” Liakas said while finishing rolling white paint over a stenciled message on one of the hearts. “We’ve got a lot of people who are really excited to be back.”