Oneonta Downtown Renaissance by Cassandra Miller
Community-driven Effort is Energizing Oneonta’s Main Street
In a time when building consensus is difficult, it’s been easy to get behind the vision for downtown Oneonta to be a destination for both residents and visitors. The city-funded Oneonta Downtown Renaissance kicked off in June with the explicit purpose of attracting people downtown.
It’s especially exciting to see how the Downtown Renaissance has sparked a wave of community-driven initiatives, such as the Oneonta Storefront Project, which fills vacant storefronts with art, and downtown business owners collaborating on promotions like sidewalk sales. Organizers and artists already doing cool things like the second Saturday Nighttime Alley Market have been able to harness their efforts to something bigger with the Oneonta Downtown Renaissance, too.
That’s the point—to engage different community members to activate downtown, which benefits all of us, from year-round residents and the college community to summer baseball families.
This summer, the city has invested in this vision significantly through:
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