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Downtown group is better now that Dobermans
gone
By Bill Whitaker
With the Cypress Building finally open, a downtown trolley
at last in gear and City Sidewalks holiday festivities set for
tonight, downtown Abilene looks better than it has in many a moon.
That's saying plenty, too.
While it might surprise those who have lived in Abilene only
a decade or so, our downtown once gave merchants and bankers little
reason for good cheer. Just 20 years ago, almost every other building
downtown was boarded-up and abandoned.
That included the Grace Cultural Center at North 1st and Cypress,
today the cornerstone of downtown Abilene's revival but in the
1970s a huge, cavernous, closed-down hotel where vagabonds stayed
for free while passing through dusty West Texas. For a while,
it was fenced off and patrolled by ill-tempered Dobermans.
Too, I remember when what city leaders this year dubbed Everman
Park, complete with fountain and sculpture, was just T&P Park,
except it wasn't much of a park except for the slumbering hobos.
I even remember writing about the old Paramount Theatre's possible
destruction if somebody didn't try real hard to save it.
I remember days when downtown was so ugly that old Christmas
wrapping paper blowing down the street could only be an improvement
-- days when even aging Wally Akin, downtown Abilene's mightiest
champion, would be mighty hard-pressed to say much good of it.
WHAT DOWNTOWN?
Those days are gone.
Several days a week and even some nights downtown can be quite
busy, thanks to the businesses setting up there, as well as the
myriad of activities at the Paramount Theatre, Civic Center, Grace
Cultural Center and Center for Contemporary Arts.
And yet, for some Abilenians, downtown is still a hard sell.
Hence the revival, several years ago, of the Abilene Downtown
Association, once pronounced dead and buried.
"The hard part is getting people to believe there even
is a downtown," association president Tom Rigsby said. "Ten
years ago if you said there was no downtown, you'd be 50 or 60
percent right, except for shows at the Paramount and Civic Center.
"But that's all turned around," he said. "Maybe
it's been slower than some people might like, but even that's
not necessarily a bad thing. It's given time for merchants to
move in, get situated and build up their trade."
People are discovering downtown. After what had once been the
Buffalo Gap Arts Festival was moved downtown last spring, I met
several Abilenians who expressed utter amazement at all the businesses
and arts centers and dining facilities there.
The fact downtown is coming back is evident in the growing
strength of the Abilene Downtown Association, which Rigsby says
now has about a hundred businesses represented and regularly voices
concerns to City Hall about parking woes and downtown usage.
WALLY AND SANTA
Certainly affairs such as tonight's big downtown parade and
lively shopping extravaganza harken back to the days when ever-flamboyant
Wally Akin, showman extraordinaire and longtime manager of the
Paramount Theatre, served as the association's director.
"He pretty well kept the association together," radio
entrepreneur Dave Boyll, now of easy-listening station KMPC 15.60,
recalled of the spunky retired showman, who oversaw the group
from 1965 till 1979. "He'd been downtown nearly all his life
and its continued existence meant a lot to him. It became a cause
for him."
Accustomed to colorful promotional gimmicks to lure people
into his movie theaters, the modest-sized P.T. Barnum did the
same for downtown.
"Christmas was the big time for him," Boyll added.
"He'd make sure Santa was there. It was just as big a thing
as Santa's arrival at the mall is now. I think one year Wally
even helped arrange for Santa to arrive at Thornton's by helicopter."
Even before Abilene Clean & Proud swept onto the scene,
Wally proved a big believer in beautifying downtown. Some of those
mammoth flower pots downtown -- the ones that look like they came
out of the movie "The Time Machine" -- came from Wally's
pestering merchants to plant trees and bushes in front of their
places.
"It really made him mad, too, when they didn't water those
things after they'd gone and planted them," Boyll remembered.
"He'd go around nights and on weekends with a water truck,
watering all those plants and trees."
Hoofing it
Boyll, a pivotal member of the association in the late 1970s
and early '80s, remembers also the discouraging days when the
association just plain ceased to exist and when, in fact, downtown
Abilene seemed to have dried up.
"Of course, the demise of the Downtown Association was
attributable to several things, mainly the malls opening up --
especially the Mall of Abilene -- and also the oil bust and the
fact there wasn't as much money in circulation," he said.
When retailers began fleeing to the malls, it was only a short
time before the utility companies and the banks downtown also
lost interest in the association. That's when folks wrote off
downtown Abilene for good.
The newly revived Abilene Downtown Association knows it has
plenty of work ahead. Parking remains a problem, albeit more in
people's minds than in actuality. When the Abilene Coffee Company
briefly introduced free valet parking this year, hardly anyone
participated.
"If you're driving down the street at 11:30 on Cypress
or Pine or Cedar and you can't find a parking spot because it's
the peak time of the day," Rigsby said, "well, yeah,
from that one narrow perspective, there may be a parking problem.
"But if you're willing to park and walk a block or so,
then there isn't a problem," he said. "I mean, how far
is that?"
I know what old Wally Akin would say if he were alive. He'd
say that's not very far at all.
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Copyright ©1996 or
1997, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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