MOUNT VERNON – When Carrie Hyman grew up in Mount Vernon (her family moved here from Pittsburgh when she was six), there was a stigma attached to the city’s downtown corridor.
“When I was in high school and middle school it was, ‘Why do people come downtown? There’s nothing downtown. You’re going to drive to Ontario and go to the mall, because that’s where the shops are. Why would you go downtown?’” Hyman recalls.
Two decades later, Hyman is back in Mount Vernon – and she’s working every day to change that perception.
Hyman is the executive director of Main Street Mount Vernon, an organization that helps connect and promote the city’s downtown businesses. She’s served in the role since September 2017, holding a prominent position on an 18-member board that features some of the community’s most influential stakeholders, from all sectors.
The last year has been a whirlwind for Hyman, who was thrust into the full-time role during a time of economic revitalization downtown, between the near completion of the restored Woodward Theatre and the influx of new restaurants and shops.
That’s why it was important for Main Street Mount Vernon to get its own downtown storefront. It would serve as a visible marker within the community, crucial for the organization’s visibility. Last Wednesday, it became official with a ribbon-cutting: Main Street Mount Vernon now has a ‘home’ in the area it promotes.
After cutting the ribbon and chatting with community members about the new digs, Hyman sat in the back room of the office on Wednesday afternoon. She glowed about the new location, which will give the organization more space than it had at its old office, 102 South Main Street.
“We realized about a year ago, about the time I started, that we had just grown too big for the space. And it was difficult to facilitate meetings or organize things because the space was smaller than our needs,” Hyman said. “This just made sense, to get a bigger space where we can have a professional meeting space.”
The new office, located at 210 South Main Street, holds two rooms – the front lobby, where Hyman works when she’s not meeting with local business owners face-to-face, and a back room, where meetings can be held.
According to Main Street Mount Vernon Board Chair Heather Brayshaw, the Ariel Foundation provided a grant to help outfit the main lobby, which features all the stylings of a living room. Outside the front door hangs a pseudo-street sign that says “Main St.” going one direction and “Our St.” going the other.
“It’s just really exciting to kind of have that polished image that we’ve been wanting to have, and to be recognized downtown as part of the community, but also as a supporter,” Brayshaw said.
Through an organized, hands-on approach, Main Street Mount Vernon’s central mission is to simultaneously enhance economic development and historic preservation downtown. The organization’s board is broken up into four committees – design, economic vitality, marketing and operations – which each have specific roles.
Within the board are ex-officio members from the Ariel Foundation, the Area Development Foundation, Knox County Chamber of Commerce, Knox County Commissioners, Mount Vernon City Council, Knox Community Hospital and the Knox County Convention and Visitors Bureau, who work alongside several at-large members.
The design committee is charged with streetscaping and facades, partnering with the city to “make sure the streets are clean and banners are hung,” Hyman said. The committee works with the city to find grants that will further spruce up the downtown district.
The economic vitality committee organizes networking opportunities between downtown businesses, promoting synergy between neighbors.
“If they want to learn how to set up an Instagram account, they can call us and we can find somebody who can partner with them and teach them how to do that,” Hyman said.
The marketing committee is the event planning group, which organizes First Fridays and the organization’s annual award dinner. The committee also establishes relationships with media in order to get the word out about local businesses.
And the operations committee handles the ‘membership’ side of Main Street Mount Vernon’s business, making sure members are getting what they need and working with organizations to explain the membership process.
A large part of Main Street Mount Vernon’s revenue comes from its membership program. Local businesses can pay a set amount to be a part of First Fridays, which Main Street Mount Vernon now hosts year-round, and also gain advertising in the organization’s monthly newsletter, which goes out to almost 1,000 subscribers.
A membership also allows businesses to be featured on Main Street Mount Vernon’s ‘Mid-Month Member News’ newsletter, and members can also be a part of the organization’s Facebook group.
Hyman said that, for a “small business,” which is comprised of five full-time employees or less, membership dues are $100 per year. Being a member allows businesses to not only promote themselves, but also learn about others in the downtown corridor.
“Our goal is to have everybody be included. We want everybody to have a seat at the table downtown, we want to make partnerships,” Hyman said. “If I hear that one organization and group is working on a project and another organization or group is working on a similar project, let’s try to get them to work together and then they could have a really great project, instead of having two good projects.”
Over the past year, Main Street Mount Vernon made noticeable changes to its First Friday structure, which led to a sharp rise in attendance. Hyman said that the organization used business and public feedback to find out what might lure families downtown for the event.
As a result, Main Street Mount Vernon extended the event beyond Public Square. It now stretches down Main Street, in order to promote more businesses. The organization also hired several new food trucks to come in from out of town for the event, including a brick oven pizza stand from the south and a chili cheese dog truck from Newark. First Fridays also featured more kid-friendly attractions this year, including magicians and face painting.
In addition, there were fewer ‘First Fridays’ this summer, which Hyman believes upped attendance. The event used to be held on the first Friday of May-October, but that was changed to June-September this year when organizers decided that the first and last months were typically rain-swept, driving attendance down.
Hyman said that before this summer, attendance for First Fridays usually hovered around 1,000 people per month. This year, however, attendance rose above 2,000 all four months, including a turnout of approximately 2,500 people in June.
“We listened, we tried to provide, and then the community gave back by coming,” Hyman said. “So that was really an exciting success for us.”
First Fridays are a microcosm of Main Street Mount Vernon’s central mission, which is to promote and connect downtown businesses. That isn’t always easy for similar organizations in other towns, however, Hyman said.
When at Heritage Ohio training conferences (Heritage Ohio is Main Street Mount Vernon’s parent company, which helped start Mount Vernon’s program in the early 90s), Hyman said she sometimes hears “horror stories” from other Main Street programs. Sometimes municipalities or chambers of commerce are unwilling to work with their city’s Main Street program, as chambers technically compete with Main Street organizations for memberships and municipalities will “pretend like Main Street programs don’t exist.”
Thankfully for Hyman, this is not the case in Mount Vernon. She has established a working relationship with Mayor Richard Mavis and Carol Grubaugh, executive director of the Knox County Chamber of Commerce. Hyman meets monthly with both Mavis and Grubaugh to talk about how they can enhance their partnership to drive business downtown.
“I can’t even fathom if we didn’t have that synergy,” Hyman said. “We really have a wonderful, supportive community, from the smallest non-profit to the biggest corporation. We have a community that wants to partner and make the community the best community it can be.”
Hyman noted that Main Street Mount Vernon has ambitious goals for the coming year, following its annual board retreat at the end of October. The organization would like to organize a downtown tour next year, as well as several banner campaigns. The board also expressed interest in updating the city’s downtown sign code, holding a ‘second-floor’ business event (with the focus of filing and updating some of downtown’s second floor spaces), improving First Fridays and making membership easier.
Another longtime goal for Main Street Mount Vernon was to acquire a spacious, recognizable downtown office space, which it did recently. Following last Wednesday’s ribbon-cutting, Hyman spoke passionately about the importance of the organization in growing Mount Vernon’s downtown corridor, which is slowly becoming a destination for entertainment, dining and retail.
Tim Ross, district director for Congressman Bob Gibbs, echoed a similar sentiment. Ross spoke after issuing a proclamation to Main Street Mount Vernon, recognizing the organization for its efforts.
“It’s very important. I mean, Main Streets kind of drive the small businesses of a town, and when you think about a town, you usually think of its Main Street,” Ross said. “So having an entity that’s looking out for that and making sure that it’s developing is a great thing.”
After spending several years working with The Ariel Foundation and Ariel-Foundation Park, Hyman has enjoyed the last year – the next step in her journey – which involves changing the perception of her hometown.
“It’s important because there’s those seats at the table, we’re all coming together at different meetings and things, and we’re working towards a mutually beneficial community for everybody involved,” Hyman said.
“A lot of that is people want historically beautiful buildings and people want programs and things for their kids, and so that’s what makes us important, because we’re trying to help facilitate all of that. We’re trying to be the glue and the facilitator that makes those projects happen.”
