It’s a common way to revitalize downtowns. By making it more attractive, people are more likely to visit, which helps the merchants.
Around us, Saratoga Springs is the leader. The city was dying in the 1960s, but they managed to leverage the track and the Performing Arts Center so that the downtown is now a pleasant place to visit.
Schenectady is trying the same thing, with some success. We had an additional sales tax to pay for things, and there have been complaints about how merchants have been treated, but the downtown area looks much nicer than it did a dozen years ago. This wasn’t the first attempt – back in the 70s, they built a moat, the idea being that people would rent paddleboats. That failed miserably, as did the awnings*, but now they’ve turned the one good thing about downtown – Proctor’s Theater – into an entertainment center. The storefronts nearby are rented instead of derelict.
*One iteration involved putting fancy awnings above the store fronts. The awnings jutted out about eight feet and were anchored with bolts, forming a triangle; the shortest side (attached to the building) was only about a foot long. It was clear to anyone who looked at them that if you grabbed the end of the awning, the leverage was perfect to pull out the bolts from the wall and collapse the thing. And, if they got covered with a foot of snow (not uncommon around here), there was no way the bolts would support it. Sure enough, they collapsed within a year and were removed.
Uh-oh, that’s bad. Around here, a city can safely support one antique store. Two antique stores downtown means the town is dying. Three or more antique stores means the town is well and truly dead. Anything more than four is unsustainable - the antique stores themselves will go out of business, transforming downtown into an abyss of vacant stores.
I wish I could say I was joking, but that seems to be how towns die around here.
That’s the first example offered in the thread that I’ve been to and would agree with. Now the first time I visited there was a couple years ago, but it did have enough of the artifical quality that it seemed “developedly quaint”. But considering its history I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been that way for a century or more.
I’ve never been to downtown Schenectady in the summer so maybe I can’t say, but I didn’t notice a lot of it there. The rock climbing/ice skating place did seem a bit creepily empty and spacious, though: perhaps they originally purposed it for conventions as well? (I guess that sort of counts because the place is so big it seems like it’s gotta be subsidized.)
(I was at my mom’s over X-mas, who lives between the two places, and my 14-yr-old sister started off an anecdote by saying “I was in Schenectady, so there were these gangsters…” I laughed out loud that seeing gangsters would necessarily follow from being in Schenectady, even though some parts don’t seem the best, and also the fact that seeing gangsters in a place whose name is stereotypically upstate NY is inherently funny, whatever the reality.
(the anecdote ended "and one of the gangster guys turns to the other and says “I think I’m gonna go get a salad.”)