‘Torches’ could be a boost for culture

 On the face of it, the Salisbury Chamber of Commerce’s replacement for the Salisbury Festival seems to be, well, not. In its heyday, the festival was a massive draw to the riverwalk park. It drew from Ocean City’s Springfest as well as from the Salisbury University student population. It was a reason for locals and visitors alike to go to Salisbury.

But then it wasn’t.

In recent years, for a host of reasons the Salisbury Festival fell out of favor and even changing the dates and focus couldn’t get it to compete with the other festivals in the region, that proliferated as small towns all over the Eastern Shore began to see the value in street fairs and took creative steps to increase market share.

Finally, the chamber cancelled the Salisbury festival promising to replace it with something bigger and better. Working with Salisbury University, it was decided that the new event should be held on what is already the biggest Salisbury tourism draw of the year, the Sea Gull Century. The idea is that, although most of the hotels are already filled, many of the restaurants at capacity and the roads in the region nearly impassable, so impressed will the attendees be that in 2016 participants will bring their families.

Rather than a replacement for a tourism loss, “Torches Celebrating Community” as the new event is called, is an augmentation of a current event, which means it will be difficult to measure its success or failure by the common metrics of hotel rooms and restaurant covers. But just because it isn’t clearly good for tourism doesn’t mean it can’t be good for Salisbury.

Inspired by similar events in Rhode Island wherein buoys along the river are set alight during an evening arts festival, businesses are being encouraged to purchase torch sponsorships, and there certainly isn’t any lack of hype. The arts angle has worked in decades past in smaller beach towns. But, for all of its contrivances and its ham-fisted branding, it could provide an opportunity for what has become a burgeoning arts community.

Downtown Salisbury still supports artists and during fair weather arts vendors do well enough on the plaza and the surrounding shops to make a go of it. Small businesses already are thriving in the area and, as long as demand doesn’t price them out, as artists succeed they may stay.

There are tax benefits for making and selling art in the Salisbury Arts and Entertainment District and that group has been working hard for the last decade to try and jumpstart the community. Tax benefits are only valuable if there are sales, and while there are a few working artists living in the district, it hasn’t yet reached its tipping point. 

That very well could change with the addition of the Rivers Edge Apartments and Studio for the Arts joining the district and bringing affordable housing and workspace for visual artists.

Additionally, Mayor Jim Ireton and the town council seem committed to the downtown and have embraced every attempt at improvement as well as having initiated some of their own.

“We’re going to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on our river walk,” he said. “And $8 million on the downtown over the next five years.”

By those lights, the event is attitudinally in the right spirit. As the town continues to focus on the downtown experience and works to reduce blight on both sides of Route 50 a fall festival that invokes this notion of the downtown as something worth investing in and celebrating fits nicely into that vision.

The Salisbury Festival thrived because it made people feel as if Salisbury had a cultural center, but when that center started to look a little too generic—there was never anything specifically “Salisbury” about the festival—it became obsolete. 

Torches Celebrating Community may be a cynical, generic name, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a building block. Given the chance and the spotlight, maybe the Arts and Entertainment folks will finally get that last big push they’ve so worked for and engage a wider community to begin celebrating.

This story originally appeared in the July edition of the Salisbury Star.