Ottawa artists, business owners pack City Hall to keep Madison Street closed for Third Friday

About 20 people stood outside Ottawa Community Thrift prior to Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

By the time the group walked the block to City Hall, it had doubled in size.

By the time the City Council meeting started, nearly 100 people, all seemingly in favor of closing Madison Street for a few hours once a month over the summer for Third Fridays.

Residents, business owners and artists attended Tuesday after Amanda Weygand, owner and operator of the Open Spaces Art Gallery, collected 1,407 signatures to show the Ottawa City Council the event is worth it.

Following a number of public comments in favor of closing Madison Street for the event, the City Council didn’t have the item on its agenda, so it did not take any formal action, but Mayor Dan Aussem said Weygand has arranged another meeting with the city to go over how the two parties can compromise to keep Third Friday running. The city’s intention was never to get rid of Third Friday, the mayor said, just to get it off of the street and into somewhere that has the proper infrastructure to support it.

Weygand has organized Third Friday for the past four years, utilizing Madison Street as a venue since the event couldn’t be conducted inside during the pandemic.

Now mask mandates and social distancing requirements are lifting, Aussem and those advising him want to prevent Third Fridays from closing Madison Street completely. The city prefers events be conducted at spaces that already have the infrastructure in place to support a festival, such as the Jordan block and Washington Square.

The proposed venue change, Weygand said, would harm the event now that it’s built a following, attracting about 150 to 200 people to Ottawa’s downtown six times per year.

“Changing locations of a growing event will confuse guests and essentially be like starting from the beginning,” Weygand said. “We will not have the attendance we’ve had in the past.”

Photographer and Artist Shanna Dugan echoed many of the other artists who spoke: Changing the location of Third Fridays has already been tried.

A car show displaced Third Friday to the Jordan block one day last summer.

“I sold zero items,” Dugan said. “Every other time, I have sold most of my art work. That pays rent and my car payment, just from that Friday alone.”

Weygand told commissioners Third Friday by itself doesn’t make her much money. What it does is provide a space for artists to display and sell their art. In return, that creates more artists and gets more people into her own store on Madison Street and other stores around her.

This includes a shop, such as Prairie Fox Books. Manager Dylan Conmy said he sees more people in his shop from Third Friday than from any other event in Ottawa’s downtown.

“When the car show comes to town, the only business we get that night and we do stay open until nine, is people coming in to ask if they can use the restroom,” Conmy said. “That’s very specific to car people.”

Conmy said when Third Friday comes around, his shop is full of people that travel from Chicago or from out of state who have become repeat customers.

John Fisher Dann, a co-owner of City Folk, agreed. Car shows and events at the parks don’t bring in customers to his store the same with Third Friday does.

“We are talking about three to four hours, one night per month and there’s another truck route a block away,” Fisher Dann said. “It’s hard for us to understand why this is such a problem.”

This was in response to one of the rebuttals from Aussem. Madison and Main streets are both truck routes, which he says makes it more complicated to close them compared to Court and Jackson streets, both of which often get shut down to allow for the Court Street Pub and the Lone Buffalo to use them as beer gardens.

Leslie Mulderink, the owner of Ottawa Community Thrift, said Third Friday gives artists support they wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere.

“We have 25 local artists on display (at my shop) and a lot of them are brand new, never displayed anywhere else before,” Mulderink said.

Artists that have been displayed at Mulderink’s shop have sold their art at Third Friday.

Participants in Third Friday made it clear they prefer the street festival vibe, but Aussem said the city has spaces made for these kinds of events.

“We’re somewhat frustrated by the number of other businesses that want to close streets since we started allowing it,” Aussem said. “A lot of this started with the pandemic.”

Aussem said now pandemic measures seem to be coming to a close and normalcy returning, the city wants to create some rules to restrict the number of times streets are closed so it doesn’t boil into an issue again.

The mayor isn’t sure whether there will be an agenda item regarding Third Fridays ready by the March 15 meeting, but the conversation remains ongoing.