There are a lot of ways to measure the growth of a community tradition. For Monsters on MainStreet, one of them is pretty simple: eventually, we had to close the road.
Long before Woodland Boulevard was filled with thousands of costumed kids, Downtown DeLand businesses were opening their doors on Halloween and handing out candy to local families. The tradition grew. More businesses joined in, more families came downtown, and by 2015, Monsters on MainStreet had grown so large that we had to close the streets to make room for everyone.
Today, it is one of my favorite nights of the year.
Not because of the costumes, although they are pretty great, or even the candy. I love it because, for a couple of hours, you can stand in the middle of Woodland Boulevard and feel exactly what a downtown is supposed to be.
Home.
It is one of the few times each year when I look around here and truly see the breadth of our community represented. Different community pockets and different generations. Families who are downtown every week alongside families who may only visit a few times a year. People whose everyday lives might not otherwise put them in the same place at the same time are suddenly sharing the same few blocks of their city.
Neighbors run into neighbors. Business owners stand outside their shops greeting families. Kids take over the street.
Home.
This year, Monsters on MainStreet returns October 31, from 6 to 8 p.m. Downtown businesses will once again fill their candy bowls, put on their costumes and welcome families for an evening of safe trick-or-treating right in the heart of DeLand.
There is something especially meaningful about watching a tradition like this continue year after year. Children who once walked Woodland Boulevard holding a parent's hand eventually become teenagers walking it with their friends. Teenagers become adults. Families change, businesses change and downtown changes with them, but the memories of this place become part of their own DeLand story.
That is part of what makes the work we're beginning now so important.
If you joined us for the DeLand Craft Show last month, you probably noticed something rather difficult to miss: WE’RE GIVING AWAY A CAR!
The MainStreet DeLand Association Car Giveaway is officially underway, with one lucky winner taking home a brand-new Mitsubishi Outlander Sport, thanks to RC Hill Mitsubishi. As exciting as the prize is, though, the real purpose of the giveaway is what it will help us build for Downtown DeLand.
Proceeds will help fund a comprehensive look at our downtown district and what it needs for the decades ahead. We'll be asking questions about where new businesses and investment can fit while protecting the historic character that makes Downtown DeLand special; how we can better use underused spaces and upper floors; where we have opportunities to improve accessibility, public spaces and connections beyond Woodland Boulevard; and how we continue creating opportunities for local ownership.
Most importantly, we'll be asking what kind of downtown we want to leave to the people who come after us.
That's why the message behind the giveaway is Support Local. Win a Car. Drive the Future of Downtown DeLand.
When I think about Monsters on MainStreet, I think about how many childhood memories have already been made on these blocks. Somewhere there is a family looking back at a photograph from a Halloween downtown years ago, with a child who is nearly grown now. This October, another family will take that same kind of photograph without realizing yet how much it may someday mean to them.
That's the thing about Downtown DeLand. We inherited it from the people who cared for it before us, we make it our own for a while, and then we pass it along. Our job is to make sure that what we pass along is strong enough to serve the next generation, while still feeling unmistakably like the place generations before them loved.
Some of the work that requires happens in the middle of Woodland Boulevard on a Saturday night, surrounded by thousands of little monsters and more candy than anyone should reasonably consume. Some of it happens much more quietly, through planning, investment, preservation and decisions whose impact we may not fully see for twenty years.
It is all part of the same work: caring for Downtown DeLand today while making sure the next generation has the chance to make it theirs.
And none of that work belongs to MainStreet alone. For more than forty years, MainStreet DeLand Association has been powered by people who decided this downtown was worth their time, their investment and their care. If you believe in that work, I hope you'll be part of it. Volunteer with us. Become a member. Make a donation. Sponsor an event or program. There are a lot of ways to support MainStreet, and every one of them helps us keep doing the visible work you experience downtown and the quieter work that helps ensure it will be here for generations to come.
Downtown DeLand has been handed from one generation of caretakers to the next for a very long time. Now it's our turn.
I’ll see you Downtown.
Stephanie Garcia Mullins
Executive Director
MainStreet DeLand Association