'Secret ingredient is the community': Metuchen is Great American Main Street of the Year
Metuchen has grabbed the national spotlight in being named a 2023 Great American Main Street of the Year.
The award, established in 1995 by Main Street America, recognizes downtowns for their excellence in community transformation and is considered the highest award bestowed on a downtown.
Only two other New Jersey towns have received the honor, Westfield in 2004 and Montclair in 2015. The Metuchen Downtown Alliance (MDA), an accredited Main Street America program, was one of three winners elected from among eight semifinalists. The two other winners are River District Association in Danville, Virginia, and Downtown Florence Main Street in Florence, North Carolina.
Metuchen will celebrate the honor in June with a Downtown Funhouse Party. In the style of a Coney Island parade, the event will feature sideshow performances, ax throwing, music, food, dancing, children's activities, street art and more.
Winners are selected from a nationwide pool of applicants by a jury of Main Street professionals and leaders in the fields of community and economic development and historic preservation. Criteria for winning include strength of the Main Street program in spurring community transformation, commitment to historic preservation, innovative programming, implementation of cross-sector partnerships, community outreach and stakeholder engagement, and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, according to the organization's website.
Dawn Mackey, MDA executive director, praised the team that worked to secure the win for Metuchen, including her predecessor, Isaac Kremer.
"To achieve this recognition in a short six years is truly awe inspiring. As an outsider with intimate insight into other small downtowns, I can confidently say what Metuchen has is incredibly unique and the secret ingredient here is the community. When volunteers, the municipality, landlords and businesses put their hearts into one mission the results are pure magic," Mackey said.
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Bobbie Theivakumaran, MDA chairwoman, said volunteers are the heart and soul of the downtown’s success from planting spring daffodils to wrangling a T-Rex on Main Street to prepping wrestlers for their matches on the plaza.
She said downtowns can be a place of wonder and even embrace the weird and by leaning into these values it brings success as business owners, residents, visitors and the local economy.
The MDA was specifically selected for its work to revitalize Metuchen's Main Street, creating innovative programming, and introducing downtown management. The MDA also was recognized for leaning into inclusive events such as Lunar New Year, a Hispanic Heritage Celebration, Juneteenth and Pride on the Plaza, while maintaining Metuchen's historic, small-town character.
In recent years the MDA has worked to improve signage and storefronts, celebrate the borough's increasingly diverse population and businesses, create placemaking and support the buy-local experience through themed promotions and events developed to drive traffic to downtown businesses.
In 2016 when the MDA was established, the borough's business district had a more than 20 percent vacancy rate. Now vacancies are at a single digit and the borough recently received additional national recognition when American Girl introduced its 2023 Girl of the Year doll, Kavi Sharma as a Metuchen tween proud of her Indian American heritage who likes to take the train into New York City from the downtown station.
The borough's downtown now balances a mixture of businesses such as a classic ice cream parlor alongside a Dominican bakery run by a French Culinary Institute graduate, home goods sourced from Brooklyn and the United Kingdom as well as a wide array of restaurants reflective of the diverse Central Jersey area.
The MDA developed a unique identity for Metuchen by creating unexpected and interesting downtown experience. A relatively new Town Plaza has been used to host large and unique events such as a pro wrestling match, break dancing exhibition and pre-prom party which all draw visitors to the borough.
Email: srussell@gannettnj.com
Suzanne Russell is a breaking news reporter for MyCentralJersey.com covering crime, courts and other mayhem. To get unlimited access, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Metuchen NJ named Great American Main Street of the Year
