From the beginnings of Shreveport all the way through the 1950s, if you wanted to go shopping, you had to go downtown.

As they might have said in the 1920s, downtown was the “cat’s pajamas!” People would come downtown on a Saturday and spend a full day and into the evening at shops like M. Levy’s, Rexall Drugs, Woolworth’s, Walgreen’s, Rubenstein’s, Selber Bros, JCPenney and others. They would eat at one of the many restaurants and go to a movie or to downtown’s giant toy store, or maybe just go ride the escalator and grab a 20-cent hot dog at Sears.

By the late 1960s, retail in downtown Shreveport had followed the lead of other cities around the country and moved – first to the strip shopping centers, later to malls and now interestingly back to strip shopping centers. The exodus of retail from downtowns was everywhere and left retail deserts in city centers with millions of square feet of empty highly visible storefront space. In some downtowns, businesses that weren’t completely appropriate for the area moved into the space, stayed a while and moved out again. In others, the space sat neglected, vacant and unused.

During the down times, an interesting thing happened. We have a much easier time of seeing things as they are rather than imagining alternatives, so we started seeing downtowns as vacant and scary or permanently challenged in some way.

It doesn’t take long for the mindset of “it’s always been that way so it will always be that way” to become firmly entrenched, and once it did, cities were faced with coming up with something to change their downtown dynamic – or to risk losing their historical core to neglect or the urban renewal of the wrecking ball.

I wish I knew the first Main Street manager or downtown group that brainstormed the Pop UP concept so I could give them credit for injecting life back into vacant spaces, but what they started has, over the last couple of years, traveled and morphed into a hodgepodge of creativity.

The one thing that is a constant in the project is that downtowns are using the pop-ups to showcase available spaces and to re-engage the public in those spaces. It doesn’t take a rocket science degree to know that places with creative retail and restaurants give people a reason to want to come to them; vacant spaces do not.

Each city has done their pop-ups a little differently – different names, different lengths of time, different requirements from the business owner or entrepreneur interested in taking part. Some offer businesses space for up to one year rent free, but in return require past business experience, a current brick-andmortar location and a battery of business plans, proformas and credit checks.

Other cities pop in and out in just a week and require much less onerous paperwork from the businessperson/ entrepreneur.

We liked two weeks – it’s enough time for the business to get in, get its feet wet, be promoted, show off products and services and create some buzz but not so long that the event becomes old hat.

If you have an existing business, we encourage you to send in a proposal for one of our three Pop UPs in 2014. If you don’t, we hope you will help us spread the word, patronize our Pop UPs, share the love on social media and help us show that downtown isn’t the way it was – or the way it will be.

We like to say the Downtown Pop UP Project is an opportunity for people to turn ideas into reality, for dreamers to become doers. It’s also a chance for downtown to show off everything that makes it a very special place to be.

Find out more information on the Downtown Pop UP Project at www.downtownshreveport.com.