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MAXWELL STREET DAYS
Now this is the way we all want it to be. Maxwell Street Days came and went but they did so in the most pleasing way possible. The traffic wasn’t too bad. The four-dollar-an-hour parking spots were all taken (thank you Charlene Klein…former mayor who was picked on a whole lot), the people were there but not packed in like sardines and the buying going on along the sidewalks was a beauty to behold. The people came, not to be observers, certainly not to go to all the closed beaches around the lake (the green algae took care of that) and not to party like it was nineteen eighty-nine.
No, they came to participate in Maxwell Street Days and take advantage of the amazing sales the local retail purveyors put out to get rid of as the winter clothing season sets down upon the region. The publisher got a pair of New Balance running shoes for twenty dollars at Jaynes, a twenty-dollar Banana Republic Aloha shirt from Haberdapper, and a crystal pitcher from Cornerstone that was marked down from a hundred and twenty dollars to thirty-four!
Maxwell Street Days have become quite a success, following the passage of rigid ordinances intended to keep outside vendors from setting up and destroying the very fabric of the sales process going on. Now, as proven, the people who own the properties and run the businesses are the only entities allowed to sell stuff put out in front of their stores.
What is the biggest element affecting higher revenues in 2024? The likely element that was different was all about Geneva Lake. The beaches were all closed around the lake due to the blooming of blue algae. The tourists all came anyway, unaware all the beaches were closed. The beaches stayed closed all three days of the Maxwell Street extravaganza. The people had little else to do, other than to hang around the downtown area and shop, and shop they did. Some stores (The GSR staff promised not to name them) raked in almost double what they normally would during this period in years past.
There is talk among the retailers about having other special outdoor shopping days to take advantage of how great it was in 2024, but of course, it’s unlikely that the beaches will be closed again. The unprecedented closure of all beaches around the lake has never taken place before. In prior alert situations, caused by either the discovery of high levels of e-coli or the blue algae blooming, only small sections of beach areas have been closed. The center of the lake remained, and remains, open for boating and other water-related activities, as the blooms migrate to the shore areas around the lake and do not remain out across the open waters.
When will the blooming be over? Nobody knows. The intensely hot summer coupled with very high humidity created the vastly sizeable growth of the algae. Normally, during summer, the algae is always present but remains, for the most part, attached to the lake bottom. The growth that surfaces, however, is affected by the sun, and the summer days of 2024 have had much more than their usual exposure to sunshine. Under the effects of a hot sun, with high humidity in the air, a bacterium grows, and that bacteria can be harmful to humans if ingested.
The closure of the beaches was the right move by authorities around the lake, but it’s a bitter disappointment to many of the tourists who want to get into the lake’s wonderfully clear water. There is a very good chance that the beaches will remain closed through Labor Day.
