{"id":25060,"date":"2017-09-29T01:35:36","date_gmt":"2017-09-29T01:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=25060"},"modified":"2017-09-29T01:36:18","modified_gmt":"2017-09-29T01:36:18","slug":"amarillos-downtown-no-longer-recognizable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=25060","title":{"rendered":"Amarillo’s downtown no longer recognizable"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I made what I consider to be a startling discovery in downtown Amarillo, Texas.<\/p>\n

After parking my car on a lot behind the brand new Embassy Suites hotel, I walked along Fillmore Street and turned the corner onto Sixth Avenue. I glanced across the street at a row of mostly empty storefronts along a shiny new wall — which I realized after a second or two was the north face of a new parking garage.<\/p>\n

I glanced eastward toward the Civic Center just to be sure I hadn’t become disoriented. There it was. The Civic Center restored my bearings.<\/p>\n

The discovery? It is that downtown Amarillo bears next to zero resemblance to the district I’ve come to know during my 22 years living in this Texas Panhandle community.<\/p>\n

The Embassy Suites is now open for business. The parking garage is finished; indeed, I saw vehicles parked inside the structure.<\/p>\n

My reason for venturing downtown this evening — in the rain — was to attend a retirement reception for a longtime friend and source I relied on when I worked for the Amarillo Globe-News. Gary Pitner is retiring as head of the Panhandle Regional Planning Commission; I’ll have more to say about Gary in a later blog post.<\/p>\n

My point with this post is to take note of the immense change that has occurred in downtown Amarillo — and the change that is still occurring.<\/p>\n

Downtown Amarillo’s evolution is a highly positive event. I sort of think of it as a butterfly that emerges from some sort of cocoon. I don’t want to sound mawkish here, but that moment as I made the turn toward the Embassy Suites door also was a realization that the evolution is real.<\/p>\n

There’s much more to come, of course. That ballpark is going to be built across the street from City Hall. They’ll take about a year to build a 4,500-seat multipurpose event venue. By April 2019, the MPEV will be done and they’ll toss out the first pitch for a AA minor-league baseball season.<\/p>\n

I’m beginning to think when that time arrives that downtown Amarillo will be even less recognizable then that it is today.<\/p>\n

That will be a very good thing.<\/p>\n\n

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I made what I consider to be a startling discovery in downtown Amarillo, Texas. After parking my car on a lot behind the brand new Embassy Suites hotel, I walked along Fillmore Street and turned the corner onto Sixth Avenue. I glanced across the street at a row of mostly empty storefronts along a shiny … Continue reading Amarillo’s downtown no longer recognizable<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[6125,290,1436,3153],"class_list":["post-25060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-news","category-local-news","tag-aa-baseball","tag-amarillo-city-hall","tag-downtown-amarillo","tag-mpev"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25060"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25066,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25060\/revisions\/25066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}