Theresa Thompson, Downtown Director for the Town of Pittsboro, on the #VisitChatham Bus Tour.
“What makes a downtown worth visiting?” Theresa Thompson put the question to the #VisitChatham Bus Tour as the coach rolled through downtown Pittsboro.
The answers came fast. Sidewalks. Restaurants. Good food. Monuments. Feeling safe. A park.
“All these things,” said Thompson, the Downtown Director for the Town of Pittsboro, “when you see a downtown that is comfortable and inviting and aesthetically pleasing and fun, it kind of just feels effortless. Well, in reality, it takes a lot of people working together to make that happen.”
That’s her job.
A planner who followed the excitement
Thompson came to the job from planning. Over her career, she said, she reviewed more than 200 development projects, and the ones that excited her were always the ones that touched an existing community. Anything to do with revitalization, that’s where she lit up.
When Pittsboro created its downtown position, the job was brand new, and she took it.
Main Street, three years in
Pittsboro is a Main Street America community, about three years into the program. Thompson said a town has to be under 30,000 people to qualify, and Pittsboro sits somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000. The program asks a town to work on four fronts at once: organization, promotions, design and economic vitality.
Volunteer committees carry a lot of that work. One promotions committee member, Thompson said, is “basically like part-time free staff” and helped put up the skeletons downtown. Thompson had spent three hours in the sun that same morning putting up skeletons and pumpkins herself.
What the program recruits is retail and restaurants. “When you start to see more and more office spaces,” Thompson said, “that’s when you don’t really see as much going on.”
The Trilogy
Pittsboro has three big destinations: downtown, The Plant and MOSAIC at Chatham Park. Through the promotions committee, Thompson brought people from all three together, and they now meet every quarter. She calls it the Trilogy.
The idea is that a visitor who comes for one finds the other two. A Friday downtown, a Saturday at MOSAIC and a Saturday night at The Plant can be promoted as one weekend.
“We look at it as a way that we can all work together,” Thompson said. “If someone’s coming into town and they know about a fun event going on at Mosaic, then they might drive through downtown or see the sign to The Plant.”
Halloween makes a good test. The Rotary Club’s Street Fair fills downtown on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Halloween @ The Plant runs from 4 to 9 that evening.
A shuttle you call from your phone
Pittsboro is working on an NCDOT grant for a town shuttle, Thompson said, and after about two years in development, it’s moving forward.
It would work something like a local Uber. If you live within about three miles of town, you’d call it from an app, and it would pick you up and take you downtown, to The Plant or wherever you’re headed, for a $5 fare.
Where your dollar goes
Thompson left the bus with one number. When you spend a dollar at a locally owned business, where the owner lives here and hires here, she said, 60 to 70 cents of it stays in the community. At a chain, it’s about 30 cents.
“That’s another reason there’s such support for the downtown program and my position,” she said. “It’s really about preserving the existing Pittsboro community, especially as all the new growth is coming in. We want to make sure that downtown is still viable five to ten years from now.”
Downtown Pittsboro
Main Street program, Town of Pittsboro
pittsboronc.gov
The #VisitChatham Bus Tour is presented by Vector Security and sponsored by Fidelity Bank, organized by The Chatham Chamber. The Pittsboro Post is covering each stop as a feature series.