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2008-06-08 BACK
Downtown Texarkana: Are We There Yet?
Downtown Texarkana: Are We There Yet? This article originally appeared in the Texarkana Gazette on June 8, 2008 By Bob Owen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Marketing at Texas A&M University-Texarkana I first saw downtown Texarkana when I visited for my professor job interview in February, 2002. On that Saturday when I drove through Broad Street, there were no people and few cars. The only business that I found open for trade was an Asian grocery. Some buildings were not much more than a front façade with the beautiful blue Texarkana sky showing through the roof. Yellow, blue, and white shopping bags swirled down Broad Street like tumbleweed in an old cowboy movie. Is downtown any better today than it was in 2002? I got the job offer, and sometime after I arrived at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, I met Bethany Hanna with the old B.O.N.D. – Business Organizations for a New Downtown. I am a marketing professor who is always interested in finding practical issues for my students to study, and Bethany was looking for a business school professor who might need something to study for class projects. We started using my classes to gain an understanding of how Texarkana fits into the surrounding area, how downtown fits into Texarkana, and how different parts of downtown fit together. Somewhere in the middle of these class projects, both sides of Texarkana were accepted as Main Street cities in their respective states, and B.O.N.D. morphed into Main Street Texarkana. The folks from the two state Main Street programs advised that a downtown can't be revitalized by simply planting trees, buying park benches, installing brighter street lights, or knocking down ugly buildings. So my marketing students started to look at who might be the customers of our downtown, what those customers would need and want, what downtown had to offer those potential customers, and what it lacked. One of the projects was an "atmospherics study," done in the Fall 2005 semester by my Consumer Behavior students to get a sense of the "look and feel" of downtown. What those 2005 students collectively determined from their analyses was a "chicken and egg" sort of issue: downtown had a downright scary feeling to them because nobody was there, and nobody was there because it felt so scary. But students came up with some tactics to escape what seemed to be an endless loop. To get a 24/7 presence of people and cars, students advised focusing first on creating living spaces downtown. To make downtown feel more busy and crowded, they advised creating light and noise. By light, they didn't mean more or brighter street lights; they meant lighting up business signs and encouraging signage that flashes, moves, or otherwise forces visitors to notice. By noise, they went so far as to suggest mounting speakers on buildings to play "garage band" music even though no socially noisy establishments existed at the time. Some even advised releasing restaurant food aromas into the downtown air. Coincidentally, some of the tactics that the 2005 students recommended were already in process at the time they were presenting their reports. Now fast forward to the Fall 2007 semester. By Fall 2007, people were indeed now living downtown. A few businesses for evening and weekend social gatherings were now present. But would the presence of a few people, automobiles, and after-dark business signs cause a new set of students to report a different "look and feel" to downtown? I gave the same atmospherics assignment to my Fall 2007 Consumer Behavior students, and indeed, they reported different observations from the group two years earlier. Contrary to the 2005 students who had described downtown as scary, the 2007 students described downtown as "a place to hang but without enough variety." Said one report, "If Broad Street gave consumers more of an assortment of social gatherings to choose from, then more people would be interested in coming to the area." These young adults don't know the abandoned downtown that I first saw; their personal history with downtown is only of the last two years or so. The latter group described downtown as lacking in many ways to meet the needs of people who work downtown, people who live downtown, and visitors who would go downtown for unique experiences in shopping, recreation, and entertainment. But their observations were nonetheless in stark contrast with those made just two years earlier. Downtown Texarkana still has a long way to go whatever is the final destination of "there", we haven't yet reached it. But downtown Texarkana has apparently progressed beyond a critical turning point in the road to get "there". When I first came here and indicated an interest in working on downtown projects, I heard a lot of comments like, "Just nuke it." Now, my college-age students are saying, "Gee, I wish there was more for us to do downtown." Yes, it appears that downtown has made a recovery in the last few years.
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Downtown Texarkana: Are We There Yet?
Downtown Texarkana: Are We There Yet? This article originally appeared in the Texarkana Gazette on June 8, 2008 By Bob Owen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Marketing at Texas A&M University-Texarkana I first saw downtown Texarkana when I visited for my professor job interview in February, 2002. On that Saturday when I drove through Broad Street, there were no people and few cars. The only business that I found open for trade was an Asian grocery. Some buildings were not much more than a front façade with the beautiful blue Texarkana sky showing through the roof. Yellow, blue, and white shopping bags swirled down Broad Street like tumbleweed in an old cowboy movie. Is downtown any better today than it was in 2002? I got the job offer, and sometime after I arrived at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, I met Bethany Hanna with the old B.O.N.D. – Business Organizations for a New Downtown. I am a marketing professor who is always interested in finding practical issues for my students to study, and Bethany was looking for a business school professor who might need something to study for class projects. We started using my classes to gain an understanding of how Texarkana fits into the surrounding area, how downtown fits into Texarkana, and how different parts of downtown fit together. Somewhere in the middle of these class projects, both sides of Texarkana were accepted as Main Street cities in their respective states, and B.O.N.D. morphed into Main Street Texarkana. The folks from the two state Main Street programs advised that a downtown can't be revitalized by simply planting trees, buying park benches, installing brighter street lights, or knocking down ugly buildings. So my marketing students started to look at who might be the customers of our downtown, what those customers would need and want, what downtown had to offer those potential customers, and what it lacked. One of the projects was an "atmospherics study," done in the Fall 2005 semester by my Consumer Behavior students to get a sense of the "look and feel" of downtown. What those 2005 students collectively determined from their analyses was a "chicken and egg" sort of issue: downtown had a downright scary feeling to them because nobody was there, and nobody was there because it felt so scary. But students came up with some tactics to escape what seemed to be an endless loop. To get a 24/7 presence of people and cars, students advised focusing first on creating living spaces downtown. To make downtown feel more busy and crowded, they advised creating light and noise. By light, they didn't mean more or brighter street lights; they meant lighting up business signs and encouraging signage that flashes, moves, or otherwise forces visitors to notice. By noise, they went so far as to suggest mounting speakers on buildings to play "garage band" music even though no socially noisy establishments existed at the time. Some even advised releasing restaurant food aromas into the downtown air. Coincidentally, some of the tactics that the 2005 students recommended were already in process at the time they were presenting their reports. Now fast forward to the Fall 2007 semester. By Fall 2007, people were indeed now living downtown. A few businesses for evening and weekend social gatherings were now present. But would the presence of a few people, automobiles, and after-dark business signs cause a new set of students to report a different "look and feel" to downtown? I gave the same atmospherics assignment to my Fall 2007 Consumer Behavior students, and indeed, they reported different observations from the group two years earlier. Contrary to the 2005 students who had described downtown as scary, the 2007 students described downtown as "a place to hang but without enough variety." Said one report, "If Broad Street gave consumers more of an assortment of social gatherings to choose from, then more people would be interested in coming to the area." These young adults don't know the abandoned downtown that I first saw; their personal history with downtown is only of the last two years or so. The latter group described downtown as lacking in many ways to meet the needs of people who work downtown, people who live downtown, and visitors who would go downtown for unique experiences in shopping, recreation, and entertainment. But their observations were nonetheless in stark contrast with those made just two years earlier. Downtown Texarkana still has a long way to go whatever is the final destination of "there", we haven't yet reached it. But downtown Texarkana has apparently progressed beyond a critical turning point in the road to get "there". When I first came here and indicated an interest in working on downtown projects, I heard a lot of comments like, "Just nuke it." Now, my college-age students are saying, "Gee, I wish there was more for us to do downtown." Yes, it appears that downtown has made a recovery in the last few years.
TOP