LAUREN GILGER: First Friday art walks have been a staple of downtown Phoenix for decades since the 1980s when a small group of artists started the event as an answer to Old Town Scottsdale’s blockbuster art walks.
First Fridays became a huge success story for downtown Phoenix — a downtown Phoenix that was often a ghost town after 5:00 p.m. And as First Fridays have grown, downtown Phoenix has transformed from something of an urban wasteland to the thriving core of a growing city.
But now organizers are pulling back. In recent years, the event has ballooned and lately it’s been plagued by violence—from fights to gunfire.
Starting this First Friday, the Roosevelt Row [Community Development Corporation] announced it will no longer be closing down streets where vendors have traditionally set up tables and sold their wares for the “foreseeable future.”
It’s a moment of reevaluation for First Friday, Roosevelt Row and downtown Phoenix as a whole and The Show spoke more about it with one of the founders of the Roosevelt Row CDC, Greg Esser, and Jessie Demaree, a musician, community organizer and second generation Phoenician.
LAUREN GILGER: So Greg, I want to start with you and this recent decision from the CDC, from organizers to stop closing down the streets. It sounds like this has been a long time coming, but tell us what led up to this decision.
GREG ESSER: It’s again, I think as you implied, a decision that’s been a long time coming. And this is a moment of reevaluation — basically taking a beat; reevaluating; getting stakeholder, resident, vendor input; and really evaluating what the best course is moving forward.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. There was a shooting nearby a First Friday, there have been fights that have broken out. I know last year Phoenix police were out there talking about enforcing juvenile curfews. Like, what’s it started to look like?
GREG ESSER: Crowds attract all kinds of people. There are bad elements, and a few bad apples can spoil the apple cart. I think that’s part of what’s happened here, but it’s not the only thing that’s happened here.
As you mentioned, the context has changed significantly. And when we started street closures back in 2005-2006, 60% of the land in this neighborhood was vacant. There was nothing.
LAUREN GILGER: Sixty percent? Wow.
GREG ESSER: It was literally a wasteland. And now we’re — Third Street and Roosevelt is the most densely populated residential intersection in the state of Arizona. That’s a lot of residents that are negatively impacted by a street closure at the end of the work week. And so that’s a new constituency that also has to be considered in evaluating the way the event moves forward.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. All right. We’ll get into more of this in a minute, more about the changes that are being made and why.
But I want to first kind of step back and take maybe a broad view of First Friday. I want to look at the history of this. Like Jessie, I know you remember First Fridays kind of from the very beginning when you were a teenager, right?
JESSIE DEMAREE: Well, yeah. They started in the late ’80s and ’90s, but I started hanging out in the Roosevelt, like downtown Phoenix arts district as we called it in like 2002, like as soon as I could drive I was hanging out down there.
And I was asked if I would just go on First Friday, and I didn’t really quite get it. I was just taking it all in as like a young teen, seeing fire artists and muralists and like street taggers and people busking along the streets, maybe pop into Modified [Arts].
But like what Greg was saying, yeah, we had a lot of space to play with. It was not — I didn’t see it as a wasteland. I saw it as like a big playground where we could express ourselves and just just have fun uninhibited in a way.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And at the time, Greg, like downtown Phoenix, as you mentioned, 60% of Roosevelt Row being vacant is kind of wild if you drive down it now.
But think about what downtown Phoenix was like back then in the late ’80s, early ’90s when First Fridays were really getting underway. Like it was a ghost town after 5 o’clock when everyone left work, right?
GREG ESSER: Literally downtown Phoenix was one of the top results if you Googled ghost towns in Arizona back in 2012. So, yeah. It’s changed significantly.
LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you Jessie about your memories of of downtown Phoenix then. Like when you went down there, did you feel like, “Man oh man, this is — there’s not much going on”?
JESSIE DEMAREE: No, not really. I mean, no. I’ve always been a nightlife person, and what was really interesting for me is like the quality of people that were down there, and we were kind of excited that people were considering it a place where you wouldn’t want to go.
We used to go to maybe Scottsdale or something for the night, or Tempe even. So the fact that most people didn’t have their eyes on it yet, like artists and developers eventually had their eyes on the downtown area, but for me it didn’t feel so dead.
It was great to be able to just like meet people and not be inundated with so many loud sound systems. And our friends would drive around in a truck in the — and this was before the road closures, right? So you’d see like people, whole bands in the back of a truck like the Madcaps driving around and circling the space, you know?
And then another band, Joe Willie Smith and all of his Metropophobobia people, once that place closed, like they would just do their sound sculptures out in the dirt lot that is now the [Roosevelt Point apartments].
LAUREN GILGER: Space to play with, though, like you said.
JESSIE DEMAREE: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just to drive it home. It didn’t ever really feel dead, especially on the weekends. But I was in school. I wasn’t there like on a Monday night or something. It was Fridays, you know? Thursday, Friday, Saturday were on.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. But it sounds like because downtown Phoenix wasn’t so developed, Greg, like it was this space for the underground to kind of take control, and that’s kind of the origins of First Friday. It was a little weird.
GREG ESSER: It was an empty canvas. We used to joke that you could pitch a tent in the middle of Roosevelt and be able to camp overnight. And that’s not far from the truth.
And that empty canvas, those buildings that were planned to be demolished created an opportunity, a transitory opportunity for artists to come in and invent things that wouldn’t have been affordable in almost any other context. And so these incredible performances, a quarter-acre installation, all kinds of interventions that sort of transformed the urban landscape through the hands and minds of artists really was the opportunity that was organic, thriving — and it was always evolving and changing.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So let’s talk about First Fridays and how they have changed. They really have grown just exponentially. And that happened, I think, probably in the first couple of decades of this event. It started to be less underground, started to be more mainstream, maybe a little bigger.
Greg, when you think about the rise of First Friday, do you think it sort of mirrors the rise of downtown Phoenix and sort of people moving in, development coming in? Did it come faster than you expected?
GREG ESSER: It came actually much faster in spite of a recession and in spite of COVID. There were a lot of impacts that sort of shifted the evolution, but it did change much faster, I think, than anyone originally anticipated.
LAUREN GILGER: What did that look like from your point of view, Jessie? Like the change that came, the prices going up? Gentrification is a word that comes to mind.
JESSIE DEMAREE: Yeah. And like when I was hanging out downtown at the beginning, it was also like not totally concentrated on Roosevelt. It was like Central and Madison before America West Arena was built and like BOB was built which, like, whatever they’re called now. Who knows?
But I went away to NAU and I would come back, and it was a really interesting perspective because I wasn’t there every weekend. So I’d come home every few months and I’m like “Whoa. First Friday’s like getting bigger.”
So it’s like watching your niece or nephew grow up where it’s like whoa, you know? They just keep jumping back, like jumping to get bigger and bigger exponentially. So it was kind of a place eventually where I just didn’t want to be. I was troubled with trying to get down there, and the things that I wanted to see, all the places that were near and dear to me were starting to close or be demolished or they’re selling the spot to get out of there as fast as they can.
So I found myself hanging elsewhere. I would hang downtown on like third Fridays. Jerusafunk would play there every third Friday. I even remember like an early rivalry of like “Oh, the musicians are clogging up too much of the artist space now. We need to have second Saturdays for the musicians and First Fridays for the artists.”
And so over the years it just like I saw it grow but from afar, from a distance. Like I said, I was already over it.
LAUREN GILGER: You were already over it.
JESSIE DEMAREE: Yeah. I feel like a hipster saying that, but you know.
LAUREN GILGER: It’s OK. It’s OK. Go ahead, Greg.
GREG ESSER: The event was really designed in the early days to draw people into the neighborhood to support the new small businesses that were starting, whether it was Fate, whether it was Modified Arts, whether it was Carly’s — really the first restaurant to open in the neighborhood — because they didn’t have the traffic, they didn’t have the residential population to keep their doors open. And a lot of those businesses made their money on First Fridays.
But even back then, the vision was always a 365, 24/7 urban walkable community. Dense, diverse, walkable were the kinds of things that we wanted to see evolve in the neighborhood.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right. We’re going to head to a break now. When we come back, we’ll talk about the changes coming to First Friday starting this week and the future of this signature event. Greg, Jessie, thanks so much. We’ll be right back after the break.
LAUREN GILGER: We’re back with more of our roundtable discussion on First Fridays, which will not look the same if you head downtown.
Organizers will no longer be closing down Roosevelt Street for the event, which means there won’t be vendors lined up along the blocks selling art and all kinds of other things. It’s in response to violence that’s been escalating in recent months as the monthly event has gotten more crowded and what organizers recently described as “ugly.”
I’m joined by artist and community organizer Jessie Demaree. Good morning.
JESSIE DEMAREE: Good morning.
LAUREN GILGER: And Roosevelt Row CDC founder Greg Esser this morning. And Greg, I want to go back to you here. I outlined kind of the changes that are coming for First Fridays there.
Tell us why do you think that Roosevelt Row leaders had to make this decision? We said it was a long time coming, but it sounds like there were other factors than just the sort of escalating fights and things like that that started to break out. It sounds like it was a neighborhood reaction as well.
GREG ESSER: That’s absolutely true. And I will preface this by saying this is not the first time we’ve gone through a cycle where the police department has wanted to focus all of the activity on Roosevelt Street just by virtue of management and resources required to provide safety for a crowd of this size.
We initially started as a small sort of dispersed number of block closures, and that drew a crowd into downtown. In order to ensure safety, law enforcement then required more staffing, more resources, and they believed that the better solution was to close Roosevelt Street, which we did around 2010.
And there was a huge negative backlash from the surrounding neighborhoods, from the community. And one of the outcomes of that was the Pie Social, to sort of heal all of the wounds that came from this very divisive discussion more than a decade ago about closing Roosevelt versus leaving First Fridays more organic event that connects a lot of different things.
And we’ve always viewed Roosevelt Row as the connective tissue between other assets in the downtown community, not as something that you draw a box around. So we’re really making connections to the rest of the community.
And those things are continuing to grow. There’s new art space on Van Buren and 24th Street. There’s new activity in the Arizona Center. There are new markets there. There’s new activity in a lot of other places. Grand Avenue has been an important arts district and area where activity continues to thrive and grow.
And so we end up having more arts activity all the time rather than just once a month. And ironically, we’ve trained people to think about coming downtown one time a month. They should think about coming down all the time, and that’s really our goal.
LAUREN GILGER: So that’s an interesting kind of byproduct of of getting First Fridays to be so successful. Now people only come down for that.
GREG ESSER: Right. And we want people all the time and there’s always something to experience.
LAUREN GILGER: Tell us more about the backlash you got when you first started closing down Roosevelt Row. What did neighbors not like about that? What did people not like about it?
GREG ESSER: It drew people to a single location, and it really sort of siphoned off activity from other areas in the downtown. And that was not our intent, but that was a byproduct of having to put everybody into one place.
That also drove our costs as the organizer up. We had to pay a lot more in order to provide that single location. We had to increase rates for people to participate, and that resulted in a lot of people who were the founders and early artists not being able to afford to participate anymore.
And we’re going through that same kind of cycle again. The costs that a Roosevelt closure versus an organic event requires aren’t sustainable with the business model that sort of established the initial creation of space for artists to sell work during the event.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Jessie, what’s your reaction to this change, to no longer closing down streets? What do you hope it might lead to?
JESSIE DEMAREE: I would hope it leads to discussions with the artists that have been there the whole time. I would really love to see — whether or not it’s somebody coming to the Evans-Churchill board for the voice of all of the the artists, or if there’s like sort of a town hall panel kind of discussion — to really get back to the roots of it so that they could guide everybody to a new vision of what First Friday could be or just what a a healthy arts district could look like in this sprawling city.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. It’s a very sprawling city.
JESSIE DEMAREE: It’s very sprawling, and that’s really interesting to know about the police wanting to concentrate the corralling everybody in because that actually feels like a really great way for kids to organize and and group together.
But yeah, I would like to see other places be able to blossom around Melrose and places on Central, or we just need to get back to places allowing space for artists to grow. Like when we were in the last few months of the closure, I work at MySpace and it’s a gallery sound incubator right next to the old Carly’s. It’s part of John’s spot.
People would just walk by because I think the brand or the aesthetic of First Friday turned into something that even a gallery seemed unnatural. So people wouldn’t really want to walk into a space, but that’s how I remembered it.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting because it started with galleries and artists.
JESSIE DEMAREE: It started, yeah. It started like houses turning into galleries and you’d be able to walk in and get some crackers and wine or something and like meet the artists.
LAUREN GILGER: Lots of boxed wine.
JESSIE DEMAREE: Lots and lots of boxed wine. So I guess I feel unaffected in a way because it’ll, MySpace will still be there. More spaces need to pop up. And I think it won’t be the end of it. There will be other places and other options in the future for us to gather and celebrate art.
LAUREN GILGER: What do you think when you hear that, Greg? It sounds like from Jessie’s point of view and from many of the artists’ points of view who have been there a long time that like First Friday lost its soul almost, and this maybe could bring it back to its roots?
GREG ESSER: Local media’s been predicting the demise of First Friday for as long as I’ve been involved, for decades.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s true.
GREG ESSER: And every time there’s a change, it’s predicted to be the end of First Friday. And I want to clarify there’s a distinction between the street closure and First Friday. If I could take something off the calendar it would be Mondays, not First Fridays.
But First Friday will always be an event in downtown Phoenix and it will continue to evolve without a street closure or with a street closure. And we’re interested in really focusing on that arts identity, which is a unique character element of Roosevelt Row.
So how do we serve artists? How do we serve the new residents that are now part of this? We’ve got a huge population of renters, so they’re transitory residents in the neighborhood. What are their needs? And this transition is another listening moment.
So Roosevelt Row CDC, the Evans-Churchill Community Association are both spending a lot of time doing stakeholder meetings, listening to people, partnering with Downtown Phoenix Inc. and looking holistically with Artlink — who’s the sort of founder and organizer of First Friday as an event, which is now a statewide organization — looking at how all of these things sort of work together and continue to foster the arts, serve residents, best serve stakeholders.
And that includes the vendors who have been a part of this event again for decades, many of them. How do we best serve all of those needs in a way that makes the most people happy?
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. But there are big challenges in that, right? Like artists can’t afford to live on Roosevelt Row anymore. There are very few galleries or craft spaces left. I mean, what’s your reaction to that Jessie?
JESSIE DEMAREE: Oh my gosh. Well, we’re always — we’re a very resilient group of people. We find ways. We relocate.
LAUREN GILGER: I mean I guess the question is how can First Friday, Roosevelt Row be more about supporting the arts, creating a true arts district, because it is — as you said, Greg — the cultural touchstone of this place. Those artists and that presence matter. But what do you do when they can’t afford to be there?
JESSIE DEMAREE: Rent caps. Rent caps. Rent control.
LAUREN GILGER: Go ahead.
GREG ESSER: The reason artists first buy started buying buildings along Roosevelt and along Grand Avenue is because they were displaced for the construction of the basketball arena and for the baseball field. Those were warehouses that were torn down, displacing artists. They realized in Phoenix that ownership was one of the ways to have a voice in how the city evolved.
And that happened along Grand Avenue and Roosevelt. But now again, they’re buying in new locations and that activity’s continuing, it’s just not in the same locations anymore. There’s a show up right now in Miami at Miami Art Works, which is a group of artists that used to be on Roosevelt and migrated to Miami (Arizona).
So that activity’s continuing. It doesn’t have the same central force as it did for a period of time on Roosevelt Street, but that’s now got a more dispersed and more permanent presence in the DNA of Roosevelt than it had when the land was mostly vacant 20 years ago.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting. Right. And it’s kind of the way, right Jessie, that cities go. Like they grow, they evolve, and the artists kind of get there first, figure it out, and then go find the new place when they are done.
JESSIE DEMAREE: Absolutely. Michael and Joanna 23 started small with Thought Crime and then they got kicked out of that space because it was being demolished. And they went to Firehouse, and then that space was demolished.
And then the resilience is truly extraordinary and just really inspirational for a lot of artists that then they moved out to Miami and bought up a lot of the downtown and kept recreating — just like a Phoenix, you know? Just keep reimagining and rebuilding, relocating. I see a lot of really good possibilities, but it’s going to happen within the community that I feel safe with, the artists.
LAUREN GILGER: All right. I think that’s a good place to end it. That is artist and community organizer Jessie Demaree and Roosevelt Row CDC founder, artist as well, Greg Esser. Thank you both for being here. Appreciate it.
JESSIE DEMAREE: Thanks so much.
GREG ESSER: Thank you so much.
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