Downtown plaza expected to be finished in July

Friday, July 28 is the current target date for completion of Sault Ste. Marie's $11.6 million downtown plaza.

Although city officials were saying three months ago that the work could stretch into August, Ward 3 Coun. Angela Caputo and Nicholas Rosset, chair of the Downtown Association, both said last week that construction is now expected to wrap up before the end of July.

Already there's talk about a kickoff party, perhaps even more than one.

At this month's meeting of the Downtown Association board, Caputo pushed the idea of the business group holding its own plaza launch event, separate and apart from whatever the city organizes.

"I am very passionate about making sure that the downtown plaza is going to be properly programmed, and I realize it is not the job of the Downtown Association to do that single-handedly," Caputo said.

"I think it benefits the merchants and everyone down here, and I wondered if there would be any interest in putting together a kick-off party."

"For all of the amenities of the plaza, I think it would be a huge misstep not to use it."

"I'm assuming [the city] is going to have a plaza kick-off party, but I was thinking that as a board we might want to do a different event – a separate one," Caputo said.

"The more things that we can plan, the better."

There was discussion at last week's meeting of perhaps doing the Downtown Association's plaza launch as part of a planned street party on Aug. 10.

In other news, there's been talk recently around the Downtown Association about bringing back the old Queenstown branding.

The Downtown Association was born as the Queenstown Association in 1976.

It changed its name in 1998 to the Downtown Association "for marketing purposes" and briefly re-assumed the Queenstown name in 2015.

So far, no one's arguing the business improvement association's name should be changed once again, but board member Michael McAdams is talking Queenstown fandom merch.

"Queenstown. There's a lot of different things we could do with that for events: t-shirts, different things like that," McAdams said.

Meanwhile, Monday is the first day the city allows bars and restaurants to open their patios.

Unfortunately, Monday is also a day that many bars and restaurants are closed.

The Downtown Association is planning to chat with city officials about changing the patio bylaw to allow the season to begin on a Friday to take advantage of weekend traffic.