After a chamber of commerce board revote, the Friday Night Music
Series will be held at the Community and Cultural Center’s
amphitheater this year.
Morgan Hill
After a chamber of commerce board revote, the Friday Night Music Series will be held at the Community and Cultural Center’s amphitheater this year.
The 16-year-old series had always been held on West Second Street.
Downtown merchants are responding with an event of their own, which will tentatively be held on Thursday nights on Second and begin about two weeks after the Friday series kicks off on June 5.
Carta Luna gift shop owner Patty Curtis said merchants don’t want to compete with the chamber’s event but do want an event in the downtown core that will boost business for them.
Several merchants planned to meet this morning to coordinate a separate street music series, to take place Thursday evenings through the summer, she said. Curtis noted that she was not taking the event planning lead and that the event hasn’t yet been named.
Many downtown business owners agreed that moving the series to the community center was going to affect their businesses.
Rick Moreno, owner of Ricatoni’s Deli, said people aren’t going to walk two or three blocks to get to the restaurants in the downtown core.
“Everybody roams through the middle area,” he said. Moreno said foot traffic from the series was one of the factors he studied when considering a location for his deli, which opened in April.
Fuzia manager Billy Brazzillo said simply, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The community center is more structured, making the event more formal than it was on Second.
“You can’t come and go as you please,” he said. “Street fairs, street dances – people like that sort of thing.”
Brazzillo agreed with Curtis and Moreno that Second Street and Monterey Road is the epicenter of downtown activity.
“Do you really think people are going to park at the community center, walk down here and then walk back? I don’t,” he said.
Chamber President Chris Giusiana said they were working with downtown merchants about possibly having food and beverage vendors on site at the amphitheater, which is located at 17000 Monterey Road.
The Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors took a revote at the behest of the Property Based Improvement District, which represents about 120 downtown property owners.
The district’s board weighed in with a unanimous vote to ask the chamber to keep the popular series on Second and sweetened the deal with an offer to become a sponsor of the series if it stayed put.
Board members e-mailed their revotes to Board President Tim Hendrick from about Friday through Tuesday. Hendrick said the results were “positive” but declined to release the tally, saying, “Frankly, it’s not important.
“We are looking at the entire community of Morgan Hill, and that was our original intent. Yes, downtown and all the other organizations are important to the chamber, but the downtown to us goes down to Dunne (Avenue).”
In late March, all 11 attending Chamber board members voted to move the series to the amphitheater.
The community center move was based on several factors, Chamber officials said, including the larger facility that was equipped to handle large crowds with parking and restroom facilities on location.
The chamber reasoned that at the amphitheater, which has a capacity of about 1,000 to Second Street’s 200, the series would have room to grow and be more family-friendly than the current location.
Last year, when the chamber considered the same move, merchants came together as well, raising money and volunteering their time to make the event a success on Second.
