I’m glad I did this, and if I happen to be in Flemington, New Jersey on the third Thursday of a month between April and December, I might do it again:

This is Flemington’s Sip & Stroll. I wrote about this program—which allows people on designated days to bring alcoholic drinks from a local craft brewery and/or distillery out on Stangl Road, of the town’s main commercial streets—a couple of years ago.

It looks like the planned food hall next to the craft brewery didn’t pencil out, or the taco restaurant, and the ax-throwing parlor moved away, but the event is still ongoing and the brewery which anchors the street seems to do strong business. The old pottery factory that once operated here is now full of small local businesses.

I had previously written mostly about the idea of “go walk around town with a cup of beer!” as an economic development strategy. I’m not sure about that, and I’m not sure we can answer definitively whether it really works. You see this with various ideas about small-town revitalization. You know, things like We can build a makerspace! We can start a small-business incubator! We can lure or boost a craft brewery or distillery! We can try to get a small boutique hotel or wedding venue! We can create an arts district! We can let people walk around and shop and eat with a cup of beer!

And you can point to a lot of success stories where a mayor, the business community, and a cadre of locals invested in the place really make this work. We talked about small town revitalization at one of the sessions at the Strong Towns/Congress for the New Urbanism conference that I attended in May; I’m going to be writing a full piece about that session and this question.

My primary question is whether these successes are quantifiable and replicable. I’d be surprised if there isn’t just an element of randomness to what takes off or doesn’t take off. And I also wonder whether there’s a first-mover advantage here. These trendy ideas may attract crowds and investment at first, but as towns in the area replicate them, they become less potent. People get used to the fad and move on. In other words, the success may not be because “We did X” but because “We did X first.”

This reminds me a little of the rotating cast of lunch restaurants in office districts. For example, awhile ago “sushi burrito” places were popping up. Most of them are gone now. Before that self-serve frozen yogurt exploded, and now it’s disappearing. Even the first places to have these things lose some advantage as a concept reaches saturation.

If every Hunterdon County town with a craft alcohol maker had a Sip & Stroll program, would it attract a lot more people? Or would it just kind of peter out? Maybe the real question is what can a small town do that gets better as more people and places do it? That really gets at something people crave and yearn for and doesn’t just generate a burst of momentary interest?

That’s my question for the long-term for this kind of thing. Well, two questions. One, everything above. And second, do these occasional events really generate real economic progress? Is getting a bunch of townspeople and locals to show up once a month to walk around with a cup of beer actually doing anything for the town—is it actually generating long-term customer bases or putting any of the local businesses into the black—or is it just a lot of walking around and money changing hands for one night?

Since I’ve been having a little positive streak about Flemington, I’ll tell you what I think could be improved about Sip & Stroll, and this applies to Flemington and to all small towns trying out activities like this. These are just my impressions as a customer/patron/participant.

It’s a bit dim. There aren’t enough streetlights or strategically placed stalls or food trucks or vendors to fill in dark gaps between brick-and-mortar businesses. The lighting in general feels too dim, especially when the crowd is a little thin.

There are too many cars—Stangl Road, the main corridor here, is lined on each side by non-parallel on-street parking, i.e. double as many cars as parallel parking. The street is very wide, but it’s not at all pedestrianized, and the sidewalks are not extra-wide either. It feels natural to walk in the street, because it sort of looks and feels like a giant rectangular town square lined by businesses. But it isn’t. And because the parking isn’t parallel, cars back up into the street fully like in a parking lot. There’s just a lot of real estate taken up by and for cars.

This would be difficult to fix, but it’s a reminder of how cars fragment the built environment when you’re not in one.

There are some cool collaborative/public spaces here—a 3D printing lab and a community arts center, for example. The signage is not clear as to whether you can just walk into these places and check them out. I think you can? But it kind of feels like trespassing or snooping. The answer to “Signage?” is always, always, always, “Yes, and more.”

The coffee shop on the other end of the strip from the brewery, which also helps to anchor the commercial node, is closed by 5pm on Thursdays and didn’t seem to make an exception for Sip & Stroll. Shouldn’t there be coffee/tea/iced drink options and little pastries? That would help fill in the small number of food trucks and stalls. The coffee shop does have night markets (on some Fridays, or at least on one recent Friday) with tarot readings and “witchy apothecary items.” I think it’s legitimate to ask whether that’s a good idea, business or otherwise, in an old-fashioned and temperamentally conservative small town. Time will tell.

One of my silliest critiques, but also honestly one of my biggest, is the cup that the brewery gives you for off-premise consumption. It’s a college-night-dollar-beer flexible clear cup, filled to the brim. What that means is that it’s very easy to squeeze and spill. It was even less sturdy than a red Solo cup, though that would be tacky, I guess. A beer-sized Chinet-style cup would cost a little more, but it would be so much nicer. You’re already drinking on the public street; it would be nice for the cup to make it easy and also a little sophisticated.

The brewery also used to have tents and outdoor seating in front of the building, which meant that on-premise customers also took part in a kind of street life. For whatever reason—and it may be the town’s reason and not the business’s—the tents and tables are now off to the side, in a spot that’s less lit, less nice, and that doesn’t help fill in the emptiness of the main street. In this picture, the street is behind me and the brewery is to my right.

It seemed like there were more people in the tent area than out on the street, which is okay, I guess? Maybe some of them would have been inside the brewery, but it was too hot to sit comfortably inside on the evening we were there.

There’s also a restaurant(s) in one building, with two concepts: a new dine-in concept, and a takeout-only concept that is actually the previous dine-in concept. The names and menus are different, but the new menu copies a large percentage of the old menu. Would it really kill them to streamline this a bit? I’d be willing to bet money the number of people who try to figure this out and shake their heads in annoyed confusion and walk away is not zero.

These are insignificant, mostly, but that’s kind of the point. Something like this shouldn’t feel forced or low-budget. It should be designed, in all these little details, to feel as natural and frictionless as possible.

And the thing is, aside from the lighting and the parking situation, the other things are just logistical details. If you get all the low-hanging fruit and execute those things perfectly, then the bigger issues matter less. Instead of “There are so many cars and it’s so dark and it’s not even clear where you’re allowed to go and the restaurant has two different menus, what the hell?” it becomes “Yeah, I guess they couldn’t close the street to traffic but it’s such a nice spot to take a stroll!”

There’s a hard-to-pinpoint moment where the latter turns into the former, and at that point you start to argue against the thing rather than for it. And the goal of the people putting these things together should be to identify and minimize all of those points of friction or confusion or annoyance for the patrons.

It was still fun to go participate in this little thing my town does. The brewery is pretty good, and a couple of new businesses will be opening up along Stangl and hopefully help to fill it in. That sense of emptiness and underutilized space can be flexed into a strength. Space for people to try things out. The zoning and the permitting and the financing all have to work in tandem with that, too. More than anything, you need locals who are invested enough to give the whole small business thing a go.

There is definitely some of that here, and I hope it can sustain and grow itself.

Related Reading:

Hyperlocal Patriotism

There’s a Small Hotel

Gentlemen, Open Your Containers

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