After five years of organizing, Wednesdays in Woodstock has bloomed.
The combination farm market and family venue is designed to bring summer weekday business to the town. It is an idea organizers hope may also pay off by giving residents a chance to appreciate their hometown.
The outdoor farm market runs from 4 to 8 p.m. each Wednesday until Sept. 24 and feature wares from area farmers selling fresh produce. Musicians and artisans are set up nearby for the benefit of people wandering past, with a preponderance of families many of them children and teens. The event takes place in a tree-lined field off a quiet lane just a short block from the town”™s commercial district. On weekends, those streets are often crowded with tourists visiting the many shops of the picturesque hamlet, but weeknights have little traffic and less commerce.
Barry Samuels, president of the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce and owner of the Golden Notebook bookstore said the chamber sees the market helping town merchants take advantage of long summer evenings.
“We wanted to enlarge the hours we could be open and have customers going to our stores,” he said. “Certainly, it is a method to get people in midweek to go to the restaurants.” Â He said they hope to coordinate with clubs and theaters to build on the momentum.
The farm-fest is also only a block from plentiful municipal parking. “The people need to be where the businesses are, the less driving the better,” Samuels said. “People park, walk to the market, walk to town to shop and eat and take their vegetables home.”
Samuels said that the town hopes for another benefit from the event, one more difficult to measure on a balance sheet.
“We try to have Wednesday be more of a community day, giving everyone a way of visiting each other and the town without the stress of the weekend,” Samuels said.
The inaugural event on May 28 was framed by glorious weather and suggested the town”™s goals were going to be realized. Hundreds of people milled around the market and more walked the town. Though some had feared the event would cause traffic problems, at 6 p.m. the height of the fun, a single town police officer sat on a traffic barricade at the intersection where the farm fest was set up, watching cars and strollers intermingle smoothly.
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Cheryl Paff, the manager of the Wednesdays in Woodstock festival stood smiling, greeting passersby. “It”™s been a long time coming,” she said, noting it took five years to overcome town board qualms and resistance from some business owners in the town.
Paff is also an organizer of the Rhinebeck farmers market operating for more than a decade and said businesses in that town raised concerns back then.
“We found these farmers markets raise the awareness and whet the appetite for this really fresh produce, so businesses selling those products the rest of the week will benefit.” “There”™s a lot of reasons this goes over well,” Paff said. “People really like making the connection with farmers who grow their food, and probably picked it that morning. And people like shopping outdoors and running into neighbors.”
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