If you had wandered Broughton Street on a Sunday evening a decade ago, you would have had the street pretty much to yourself.
Broughton’s resurgence was well underway at that point, but the strip was often eerily quiet in the evenings, especially on Sundays.
Even today, many Broughton Street retailers are closed on Sunday, but one can’t help feeling that they’re missing out on sales. Unlike a decade ago, the foot traffic remains pretty steady on Broughton through the afternoon and into the evening.
On a recent Sunday after dark, myriad folks were peering into closed shops and stopping at various establishments for dinner, ice cream, coffee or yogurt.
After the slow years of the recession, it’s good to see so much activity at off-peak hours, however tentative the gains might be.
While things have gotten better, times are still tough for many small businesses.
Lime Grill on East Broughton Street and Super Bowl on State Street both closed recently. A note on Super Bowl’s window cites family circumstances.
Both spots were relatively new on the downtown restaurant scene, and I had written favorably about them here.
Those closures come at a time of strong interest in downtown’s commercial corridors, so maybe we’ll see new tenants move in quickly.
But both restaurants occupied tricky locations with inconsistent traffic.
State Street near Wright Square sees a lot of pedestrians during the day, including office workers from nearby government buildings and tourists going to or from Telfair Square.
But foot traffic on the blocks south of Broughton Street drops off dramatically at night. And locals who might be tempted to drive downtown for dinner are discouraged by the lack of on-street parking, a result of the overreaction to security concerns at federal buildings after 9/11.
There are more evening pedestrians on Broughton Street, of course, but restaurants on the south side have had a tougher time in recent years than those on the north side.
Ditto for those further east, although there are obvious exceptions.
Much of our tourist activity is concentrated in the Ellis Square area and on River Street. Many of our hotels are on Bay Street.
Tourists wandering to dinner follow predictable routes, so the restaurants that they chance upon first have obvious advantages over those even half a block further away. The same dynamic plays out for retail stores during the day.
There’s no easy solution. Every tourist-friendly city seems to have blocks where foot traffic drops off noticeably and busier blocks where tourists are more concentrated.
The answer is to find a niche with locals, but that can be tricky, too, given the low residential density in the Historic District.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net and http://www.billdawers.com. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.