“All they’re doing downtown is putting in bars and drinking establishments.”
Hogwash. The problem with this nonsense is that it is so easily disproved that the person saying it has to be either ignorant or lying. As a charitable person, I prefer to think that they are ignorant. The word “ignorant” isn’t necessarily a pejorative. It just means that the person doesn’t know something. They lack information. This lack can be either honestly represented, or purposefully curated. An ignorant person who is honest can still be educated. Some people are ignorant on purpose, or dishonest. Hopefully, they will see their lack of information and remedy it and perhaps stop being wrong. If not, then… it was something else.
Anyway… How gorgeous was it last night? We hadn’t changed the clocks yet and it was the gloaming – that electric blue of dusk when the light from the day now passing hasn’t yet disappeared and the streetlights are flickering on and the air is crisp but not cold and the sidewalks are alive with people downtown, especially on this Saturday night.
If you’ve known me long and read much from me, you know that this is my time. My golden hour. The time travel time. But on this night, I’m heading back to Lucille and Mabel to work behind the bar so there’s no traveling for me.
Or is there? Let’s just go in our minds, shall we?
The first customer at the bar this Saturday walked in alone with a shopping bag from Shaw’s Marketplace. He sat down and looked at me then looked around.
“I’ve never been here before. This place is pretty great.”
It is pretty great.
“You’ve been shopping at Shaw’s?” I said.
“Yes. Just came from there. Now I’m just hanging around downtown until I meet up with some friends.”
Shaw’s Marketplace is a fantastic business idea with a business blueprint that resonates throughout history. It is a central marketplace, but all in a big building. Like a small mall, only better. It’s not a junk store or antique mall (though those places are awesome,) it is an incubator for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs who want to perhaps own their own bricks-and-mortar store locations someday. There are no big corporate chains. If you meet one of the shop owners, it’ll be someone who lives in the area and who just wants to make it and thrive in an increasingly hostile business environment. You know? These are economic heroes in a time when we desperately need them. These are the people you are throttling when you spread lies about what is happening downtown. But let’s dive in a little more, shall we?
Downtowns were historically thriving commercial areas – hubs of activity where people who lived “out there” elsewhere in the city or out in the country could come and park their horses or their wagons or their cars and do all their business mostly on foot. They called it “trading,” back then. There was no sense in having the bank and the supply merchants and the livery stable and grocery store miles apart where you could only get from one place to another by some means of conveyance. Having a central business district just made sense. Like water finding the lowest level, downtown districts happened naturally. That’s the history.
I could go back further. “City” comes from “citadel” which was a defensible fort or walled area where people who lived “out there” could go for safety when enemies were approaching. Private merchants and entrepreneurs found it helpful and safe to put their shops and marketplaces in the citadel – or just outside it. The people who owned and worked the shops would often live above the shops, or near them, and business districts developed. The term “downtown” first appeared in the late 1700s, but really took form based on the fact that Manhattan Island was populated from the south to the north. As the city grew, the only real direction for growth was northward. The merchants, banks, shops, etc. were huddled on the south end of the island and that area because the central business district… thus DOWN TOWN.
Notice something though. Downtown business districts started as incubators for small businesspeople to enable them to control costs, mitigate risks, and be readily available to customers. These weren’t corporate megachains. These were the mom-and-pop shops that built and sustained the country and produced most of the wealth that brought almost all of the earth a standard of living that enables the life you now live. Small businesses lifted the world out of poverty.
Shaw’s Marketplace is a microcosm of the history of any downtown. Maybe a fractal, if you know what I’m saying.
“I’m not shopping downtown! Not as long as all they are putting down there are alcohol establishments, bars, and clubs.”
At first, when I saw this on Facebook, I planned on ignoring this obvious falsehood because it is SO incredibly untrue that it is hardly worth my time debunk(er)ing. But… then I would sit out in front of my downtown apartment every day and watch the construction going on literally in every direction around me. Across the way and just down the street Matt’s Mantiques is renovating on the corner. I know Matt Arrington and his wife and he is the poster boy for the small-town entrepreneur trying to make it and build our economy during a difficult time. In almost every other direction, buildings are being renovated. Just across the alley (but the entrance is around the corner on Fisk) is the Over The Rainbow ice cream shop. I love that place. Kid-friendly and Bunker-approved. There are literally dozens of new shops and stores that have opened downtown in the last few years. Go check out Saturdays or Hamilton’s or some of the older downtown mainstays like Nathan’s.
The fact is that probably 8 out of 10 of the businesses going in downtown… maybe 9 out of 10… don’t have an alcohol element at all. Luna Maya, the new, wonderful, baby and children’s boutique is just down Center Avenue. They started their business at Shaw’s and now they have their own large store. Kim and Brent Bruton run the Intermission bookstore on Center (no alcohol but tons of great books!) and it is there where I met many of the businesspeople who are building their own independent businesses downtown. I now consider almost all of them to be my friends.
And listen, the dumbest thing about this completely false assertion is the idea that somehow an area where people can shop, get a haircut, get their dog groomed, and/or visit bars, pubs, and restaurants on foot without driving is bad… while the same people eschew downtown so they can drive to the big corporate chain restaurants THAT SERVE ALCOHOL.
Teddy’s Brewhouse, Pioneer Taphouse, Primal Brewing, CJs, Stone’s Grove, 10mile Productions, The Turtle, Lucille and Mabel, and all the other restaurants and bars downtown (a small fraction of the businesses) are all locally owned and operated. You can go downtown this week and talk to the people who own these businesses. These are your neighbors! Fuzzy’s Tacos is part of a franchise, but the franchise owners live right here in Brownwood and are often the ones taking your order! Again, these are your neighbors. Are you loving your neighbor when you lie about them and instead send your money to the corporate megachains whose owners live in big cities far away? And here’s the kicker… Just like you can go into Chilis or Cotton Patch or any of the chain restaurants that serve beer AND NOT ORDER ALCOHOL if you don’t want it, you can feel perfectly comfortable going into Teddy’s or Pioneer or Lucille and Mabel and ordering a wonderful meal with a glass of unsweet tea or a Coke. Whatever floats your boat. If you don’t want alcohol, don’t drink it. If you don’t want to go to a bar. Don’t go. But listen, if you’re going to spread misinformation, at least look the local owner in the eye when you’re online on social media trying to cut his or her throat.
Imagine opening up a kid-friendly ice cream shop and then getting online to see someone lying about downtown to keep people from coming to your shop!
There are new businesses opening weekly downtown. Small family-friendly shops, merchants, and entrepreneurs are eager to work for your business. If you’re too lazy to do your own research, hunt me down and I’ll take you around and introduce you. These people deserve better than to spend their life savings trying to build something generational, to serve their community, only to have ignorant people trying to hurt them in order to preserve the super-megalomart-restaurant-shop-chains whose owners take those dollars out of town.
Now you know. Do better.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
