Companies keep opening
The Fringe Coffee House, which will employ only felons, recently opened at 918 High St., and is decorated with murals by local artists, recently opened. Vision Source this month moved a few blocks to its new location at 644 High St., in a 90-year-old building that had seen better years. That building now has been lovingly restored.
HUB on Main continued work to create “Hamilton’s Urban Backyard,” which is what the HUB stands for. It is to be a craft brewery/sports bar/cocktail lounge, with parking for food trucks, and a garden-style area next door for people to enjoy food and beverages. The 500 block is considered vital in revitalizing Hamilton’s Main Street corridor — especially because it will eliminate a gap of vacant properties, and also will make use of a vacant building.
Other recent openings have included Soulshine Wellness on Main; the Reptile Pit, which sells reptiles and other unusual pets; and Main St Throw Shop offers disc-golf supplies as well as skateboard equipment.
Some of the companies have opened because owners are confident that when the under-construction gigantic indoor sports complex Spooky Nook Sports Champion Mill opens in late 2021 or early 2022, it will attract tens of thousands of athletes and their families on weekends to the city.
Between games, or after those games end for the day, those people will be looking for places to eat, drink, shop and be entertained. Butler County people who have visited the existing Spooky Nook facility near Lancaster, Pa., have seen the jolt of positive energy that place has meant to the surrounding area.
Rapid Response Team helps
The Rapid Response Team, an ad hoc group of city employees, the Greater Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and others developed several ideas to help businesses survive the shutdowns and other business-slowing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Among those ideas were
- Hamilton’s $300,000 gift card program that helped dozens of small businesses, by essentially providing them short-term loans that are being repaid as people buy gift cards to the businesses, and those are redeemed by the goods and services the businesses provide to the gift-card holders.
- Creation of 10-minute-maximum curbside pickup parking areas that allow people to park and pick up take-out food from restaurants. “We’re going to keep this, going into the future,” City Manager Joshua Smith said. “It was so popular, our restaurants liked it so much.”
- Outdoor seating and painting of some alleys to make physically distanced outdoor dining more available near small businesses in the downtown and Main Street business areas. “At a time when a lot of restaurants across the United States were closed — many of them closed permanently — our restaurants quickly adapted to carry-out, take-out, DoorDash, Uber Eats and eating outdoors.
Meanwhile, Adam Helms, the city employee who directs the summer concert series at RiversEdge Amphitheater, worked with Hamilton Health Commissioner Kay Farrar to create physically distanced concerts that began July 4. Using an innovative approach, the city laid down plywood planks telling families or other groups of people where they could sit so they would be distanced enough from other concert viewers.
Spooky Nook construction continues
Construction of the 1.3-million-square-foot, $144 million Spooky Nook project continued. It is scheduled to open in December of 2021.
Neighborhoods a greater focus
As the city focused on improving and stabilizing its neighborhoods, Miami University students created a plan to improve the North End neighborhood. They hope to work with another neighborhood in the future.
Street-repair levy is approved
After decades of crumbling streets, Hamilton voters in May approved a street-repair levy, and later voted online for the streets they most wanted to see repaired soon.
Peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrations
While protests over deaths across the nation of people of color at the hands of police were violent elsewhere in Ohio and across the country, they were peaceful in Hamilton and Middletown.
Demonstrators made their points, sometimes lying on the sidewalks to represent dead people, but were respectful of others and received compliments from police and city officials.
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