photo by: Mike Yoder

The sun warms up shoppers outside Weaver’s Department Store at the corner of Ninth and Massachusetts streets during the 60th annual Downtown Lawrence Sidewalk Sale Thursday, July 18, 2019.

Maybe the sunscreen industry was behind it, or maybe it just happened organically, but somehow shopping on a sidewalk in July became a Lawrence tradition. Get ready for that tradition to change.

Downtown Lawrence again will have a big retail sale on the third Thursday of July, but the organization has decided to no longer market it as a sidewalk sale. Instead, it will be a “Summer Sale.” Businesses still will have the option of having their merchandise on the sidewalk, but many others are expected to simply conduct their sales inside their stores.

More and more businesses had started to do that over the year, and the executive director of Downtown Lawrence said the group decided it was time to adjust to the trend.

“When you brand something as a sidewalk sale and there are large tracts of unoccupied sidewalk, it tends to look scraggly,” Sally Zogry, executive director of Downtown Lawrence Inc., said. “And then you start having customers say, ‘Oh, it is not like it was.'”

It hasn’t been like it was for awhile, now. If you recall, Downtown Lawrence didn’t have the July sidewalk sale in either 2020 or 2021, because of the pandemic and the health concerns related to thousands of people gathering on the streets in downtown.

But last year, downtown did host a sidewalk sale in September. Part of that decision was related to some pandemic factors, but a big part of it was related to some merchants saying they really didn’t enjoy being in the July heat.

Zogry theorizes that it took the pandemic for those merchants to see that changing the tradition — the sidewalk sale is more than 60 years old — was OK.

“I think 2020 and 2021 gave people permission to say, ‘I can do something different,'” Zogry said.

Well, kind of different.

The Downtown Lawrence membership didn’t want to completely abandon the idea of a sale in July. But, there also was a sizable number of merchants who thought the September sale was nice too.

So, Downtown Lawrence Inc. will host a special retail event in September as well. On Sept. 10, a Saturday, downtown will host a “Customer Appreciation Day.” Again, merchants will have the option of setting up booths on the sidewalk or hosting sales inside their shops. The September event also is expected to have more ancillary activities, including some live music, activities for kids and maybe some street closures for broader entertainment.

The September event may not have as many bargains, though. Zogry said the Customer Appreciation Day won’t be marketed as an event to get deep discounts on items. The Summer Sale in July, however, will continue to have that theme. Big discounts have been a big part of the Sidewalk Sale tradition in downtown.

“The July event is definitely going to be marketed as a sale,” Zogry said.

While the idea of discounts isn’t changing in July, there is one other major change on tap for the sale. Unlike the old sidewalk sale, the new Summer Sale won’t be marketed as an event that lasts from “sunup to sundown.” The group is still working on how to describe the hours, but Zogry said there simply were too many businesses that weren’t starting that early or running that late. Retailers are being asked to tell Downtown Lawrence Inc. when they expect to be open on the July 21 date, and then DLI will figure out a timeframe to use in its marketing materials.

The times for the Customer Appreciation Day on Sept. 10 also are being finalized, but Zogry said many customers will be excited that event is happening on a Saturday. The Thursday date for the sidewalk sale gave some shoppers an excuse to take a day off work, but also left some people out, Zogry said.

“The public has been asking for a Saturday sale for years,” she said.

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As I noted above, the September event may include closing off a block or two in the downtown area to host some entertainment or other ancillary events. Zogry said it has been evident for awhile that members of the public find standing on a downtown street — perhaps with a beer in hand — appealing.

Now, Downtown Lawrence Inc. and the city may decide to make that process a little easier.

Zogry said that a project has been submitted as part of the city’s Capital Improvement Plan that would put some structures in downtown that would allow select downtown streets to be closed off without crews having to haul in lots of barricades.

Instead, they may be able to simply close a few gates or raise some bollards that would come out of the pavement. Zogry said downtown and city officials began thinking about such ideas because it is more expensive and time consuming than you would think to have crews transport, set up and then tear down the number of traffic barriers needed to safely close a street.

Plus, there is a new challenge. Zogry said some events have wanted to close down a street recently, but had been unable to find available barriers to use because there is so much construction work going on that they are all in use elsewhere.

There’s no guarantee the project will come to fruition. The city each year gets more capital improvement requests than it chooses to fund, plus details about what streets would be eligible for closure also would have to be worked out.

But Zogry said you don’t have to look back any further than the Final Four celebration to see how dynamic of an attraction Downtown Lawrence can become when activities are placed in the street.

However, Zogry said she doesn’t think the project would be a first step to creating a permanent pedestrian mall in downtown. Merchants have consistently expressed concern about losing parking by closing streets permanently. But Zogry said there have been professional planners who have said Lawrence’s downtown isn’t well suited for a pedestrian mall. She said those planners note that the most successful pedestrian malls usually are in downtowns that have more of a grid pattern than the long, linear design of Massachusetts Street.

I hadn’t heard that before. Regardless, the street closure project in the CIP should be interesting to watch, as closing streets in downtown has been known to create strong opinions among people. Look for the CIP projects to get selected this summer.