Ohio Lt. Governor Lee Fisher, Portsmouth Mayor Jane Murray and Main Street Portsmouth Director Zoe Richards tour historic downtown Portsmouth on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s amazing what paint and flowers will do,” Portsmouth Mayor Jane Murray said. “We’re really trying to get the whole community to understand. You pick up the trash, and you paint, and you put out a little flowers, and it just changes the whole nature of your house, your building, your office, your business. That’s what we want to try to encourage, and the Main Street folks are just tremendous. They never fail me.”
Main Street Portsmouth announced last week that it has been recognized as an accredited National Main Street Program for meeting the commercial district revitalization performance standards set by the National Trust Main Street Center.
Main Street Portsmouth is a revitalization program that promotes historic and economic redevelopment of the traditional business district, including the areas roughly between the Scioto River east to Gay Street and the Ohio River north to 11th Street.
“They are such a hard-working group of people,” Murray said. “The money that the city has put in the budgets in years past, but they haven’t actually authorized, we are finally able to do that to help historic preservation. They’re the only group doing historic preservation.”
Murray said she recently was behind a car on Richie Street in which someone threw a fast-food cup and a straw out onto the street.
“The whole street is clean,” Murray said. “There is not a speck of dirt, and whoever he or she was, it just made me furious. I just stopped, picked it up, and put it in my car to dispose of, and I just pointed at them, like — what a bad person.
They do it to my corner all of the time — beer bottles, wrappers.”
Murray has repeatedly said one of her priorities is the beautification of the city, and historic preservation.
FRANK LEWIS can be reached at (740) 353-3101, ext. 232 or flewis@heartlandpublications.com
They showed no respect for the property and eventually ended up killing some of the plants.
I fear good money has just been wasted. How about using any "extra" monies to keep the fire departments all open. Beautifying is great, but jobs are more important.
extr
I understand that the first Main Street grant went to the director's salary, and that was it. And what I've seen so far from them is mostly repeating programs that others had already established. This isn't economic nor historic development, in my opinion.