Downtown hopping with festivals & more
Buildings getting visits from propective tenants, vintage cars on display and celebrating Texarkana’s origin as a railroad town all came together Saturday during the sixth annual RailFest.
This year marked the first time Main Street Texarkana arranged for people to take self-guided tours of nine vacant downtown buildings in need of owners.
Several festival-goers scoped out some of these buildings— taking note of vintage facades and other points of interest.
One of the buildings, known as the Cellar, is a dining room extension of Verona’s Italian restaurant. It landed on the list even though it’s been occupied since last year. Paul Estes, manager of the restaurant at 210 E. Broad St., said it seemed to serve as a good example of what old vacant buildings can be turned into.
“It used to be a ladies shoe store decades ago, but now we use the former shoe display
racks to hold bottles of wine,” Estes said. “We even have old peices of downtown in her like one of the Masonic Lodge pillars.”
Estes added that while expanding Verona’s to include the Cellar, he found the interior walls seemed sturdy despite the building’s age.
“We mostly just had to do some painting and rehabilitating, and that was about it,” he said.
Tourists taking part in the Imagine the Possibilities tour of unused buildings got a special treat as they toured the City Market, once known as Ritchie Grocery Store, built in 1894. There the owner, David Peavy, hosted a guided tour of his recently purchased, three-story, turn-of-the-century brick and wood structure. The tour included a basement visit, where bananas were hung to ripen before selling. Upstairs included a metal chute used to send packaged goods to the first floor.
Peavy said he plans to install apartment lofts on the top floor and while using the first floor for commercial retail space.
Emily Koller, who works as a planner for Texas Main Street organization, said while touring the Ritchie Grocery building that she was impressed by the number of people downtown.
“I couldn’t believe many people were here, so it did look like a good idea to pair this tour with RailFest,” she said.
In keeping with the RailFest flavor, one of the other buildings on the tour included the historic Collingsworth Railroad Hotel at 409 Texas Blvd.
Walther C. Kahanek said the building, which has undergone a relatively new interor remodeling, might go back to the 1920s.
Kahanek added that local lawyer Jim Hooper used the building from about the mid-1970s until his passing in about 2000.
“Anyone interested in the building now can use it for whatever they want,” Kahanek said.
Apart from the tour, a flock of 22 Chevrolet Camaros, including models from 1967 to 2017, trekked into Texarkana for the 12th annual Spring Car Show this year, which marks the Camaro’s Golden Anniversary, first rolling off the General Motors assembly line in 1967.
“These cars, which were a competitive answer to the 1964 Ford Mustang, were initially liked by women because of their small engines and good gasoline mileage,” said Sam Johnson with Four States Auto Museum. “Then men started to like them.”
A new Camaro costs $31,000. A 1968 Camaro brought brand new was $2,700.
Organizer DeAnna O’Malley said she was pleased with the weather for RailFest. She said she had three weeks to organize the festival, as funds from the city’s Advertising and Promotion Commission were not released until last month.