WHEELING, W.Va. (WTRF) – With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, a little extra love is being shown in many ways. 

Volunteer Wheeling is a group organized through Wheeling Heritage and the City of Wheeling that focuses on a small-scale beautification projects, and they showed some love for the Blue Church in East Wheeling by “heart bombing” this historic site. 

“Heart Bombing” is a phenomenon around the country where community members show how much they care for vacant or important buildings throughout their city by cutting out tons of hearts and using them as decorations. 

Several local organizations like Wheeling Heritage and Nail City Painting came out to show their support for the future preservation of the city.  

”It is absolutely amazing just to see the community members coming out to support a building that could potentially not be here today had we not stepped in and just to see the community support behind the projects that Volunteer Wheeling does. Volunteer Wheeling wouldn’t be a thing without the volunteers behind it so it’s really great to see people out here today. We got beautiful weather for it so it’s just overall been a really great day.”

Cassie Minder – Communications & Development Manager, Wheeling Heritage

”I mean, it’s really rewarding, you know, personally, I really like to see the old architecture stick around and not go anywhere and there’s a lot of it in Wheeling, a lot of it that is completely fine and salvageable. Just needs a little bit of love and care to get it back, so it’s cool to be a part of supporting that.”

Kyle Kinkead – Nail City Painting

The Blue Church was purchased by Wheeling Heritage, and the hope in all of this is that a developer will come in to renovate the space into something for the entire community to enjoy.