Where are all the people?…Traffic down, sales down, what’s up?
The Commons is known as Ithaca’s hub of constant activity. Couples stroll with warm coffees in their hand. Old friends sit down for a game of chess. Cars glide and stop around downtown’s border. And shop owners open their doors to residents, tourists, students and their visiting parents.
But what happens when their doors open, the register is on, and no one comes in?
“Most of the month of March you could have driven a car [on The Commons],” Habitat of Ithaca owner Jennifer Pawlewicz says of The Commons’ empty walkways. “No one was here.”
Pawlewicz opened Habitat’s location on The Commons at the end of November 2006. The shop had occupied two other locations previously, one store on Meadow Street before moving to the heart of Route 13’s shopping next to Barnes & Noble for five years.
At first, the move downtown exceeded all of Pawlewicz’s expectations, she said. The response was fantastic; traffic was steady in and out of the store. Then it gradually slowed down, she explained. This Christmas, her store saw about half of the people compared to the year before.
The decline, even if anecdotal, begs the questions: Where is everyone? Why is no one shopping downtown? If tourists can travel far and wide to shop in The Commons, then where are Ithaca’s residents?
