San Antonio.- Mayor Julián Castro and Dist. 1 City Councilman Diego Bernal share the podium at this week’s One Year Anniversary of the Downtown Tuesday. The event was celebrated at the trendy Havana Hotel. (Photo, Joe Sandoval)
It’s rare that you see a one year old running, after just learning to walk. That’s just the City of San Antonio’s Downtown Tuesday project is doing and the city types are really excited, as it celebrates its one year anniversary.
To insure that there’s no stumbling City Manager Sheryl Sculley told La Prensa and others the city is holding a contest in honor of the one year celebration of Downtown Tuesday. We invite the public to participate. For this contest the city is asking residents and visitors of downtown to post their pictures online of their favorite Downtown Tuesday experiences.
“Whether they use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest whatever they use, we want to see people enjoying Downtown Tuesday,” an excited Sculley said. “For the contest we’ll be selecting weekly winners and there will be a Grand Prize winner and that will include six-months of free parking in the St. Mary’s garage. We’ll have weekly winners and a Grand Prize winner.”
The contest runs through March 12
The man behind Downtown Tuesday has the downtown sector in his district, Councilman Diego Bernal. Needless to say he’s proud of his accomplishment with the year old project. He pointed out the genesis of Downtown Tuesday and what the real spirit of it is.
He said it’s really two-fold. The first thing being is that one of his missions is the mayor’s vision of downtown and SA2020 to make sure we return downtown to the residents of San Antonio.
“We’ve done a very good job of making ourselves a tourist-friendly city and we’ll continue to do that,” Bernal explained. “Whenever you travel some where you never ask yourself where the other tourists are, you want to know where the people are. One of our missions is make sure that this is a space that is shared equally by tourists and the residents. So this is really about getting residents back downtown.”
The second thing is that he knows they call Downtown Tuesday the new Friday, it’s still Tuesday. He admits there’s not a lot of ways to make Tuesday particularly ‘sexy.’ However, if you ask downtown business owners what can we do to make your life a little better, to make it a little easier?
“What they all will say is, regardless of whether they run a hotel or a restaurant, a bar or a shop, if you could just increase foot traffic a little bit that would go a long way,” Bernal said.
We took the least busy day of theirs or evening, Tuesday night and did something to a small degree to increase foot traffic. That in turn allowed people not only to come downtown to experience the night and maybe discover something along the way that will bring them back either in an afternoon, a weekend and so forth.
“Downtown has its place as a special events center, like Fiesta, but we want to make it a place visit regularly and that’s really what Downtown Tuesday is about,” Bernal added. “It’s about returning our downtown to the people of San Antonio and helping our small businesses thrive especially on a day when they have the least foot traffic.”
Joe Sandoval is an editor at La Prensa de San Antonio. He may be reached at editor@laprensasa.com.
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