RDA revises Thursdays Downtown layout
Thursdays Downtown, Rochester’s weekly summer music and craft festival, will shift away from Peace Plaza and toward the southern part of downtown in 2020, according to a revised map released Thursday by the RDA.
It is the organization’s second attempt at developing a layout that appeases a myriad of stakeholders and city departments.
An earlier version, released in August 2019, showed the event moving down Fourth Street Southwest toward South Broadway. However, that plan was scrapped after the city asked that Fourth Street remain open to ease the flow of east-west travel downtown. (There were also concerns about limiting traffic in and out of the Third Street parking ramp.)
The revised layout shows the event going down First Avenue and Historic Third — like it has in the past — and then breaking at Fourth Street before extending down First toward Pasquale’s and the People’s Food Co-op.
Proposed layout for 2020 Thursdays Downtown / RDA
Holly Masek, executive director of the Rochester Downtown Alliance, said the map will still allow for “a large, safe, and fairly uninterrupted event layout.” Her office is now working with businesses at the intersection of Fourth and First to make the crossing as safe as possible.
“No layout is perfect,” Masek told us Thursday via email. “Wherever we moved this event, we knew we would be impacting businesses. We are extremely grateful for the compromises that our community members are making in order to keep this event viable.”
As we have reported here previously, the event is being moved this year to accommodate the Peace Plaza reconstruction project. That work, officially coined Heart of the City Phase I, is expected to begin this spring.
Masek indicated there had been talk of scaling the event back while the Peace Plaza/First Avenue area was under construction. “However,” she said, “we felt that the event has become such a source of community pride that we wanted to push forward with a full layout.”
With the new layout, Thursdays Downtown expects to fit 109 weekly vendors, just six short of last year’s total. (The organization began accepting vendor applications today.) There will also continue to be two stages — one near the Fourth Street intersection and the other by Sixth.
The first Thursdays, by the way, is just 91 days away.
Sean Baker is a Rochester journalist and the founder of Med City Beat.
