As hundreds of people filled the 200 block of West Washington Street Saturday to drink craft beers from around the region, OktoberWest event organizers hoped people saw the area as a growing and vibrant area they should visit more often.
That's the West Side that Ronda Boyd remembers.
Boyd is 54 years old now, but when she was a young girl living in the West Side, she remembers feeling proud of the area she lived in.
"We ran the streets pretty much, and it was safe," Boyd said. "That's what we did, and it was a cool place to live."
Boyd and her husband still live in that neighborhood, in the same house her mother lived in before she passed away. Many of her older family members have died, and the younger ones have moved away to bigger cities like Atlanta and Washington, D.C., for better opportunities.
She came to OktoberWest because she wants to support her part of town, and she wants other people to see what she has seen for all these years.
"I think it's a great cause," Boyd said. "It's a good cause, and I see a lot of businesses coming in. I hope that continues, because I'd like to see it come back.
That's exactly the kind of thing Steven Romano, the West Side program director for Charleston Main Streets, wants to hear.
Romano said OktoberWest is a long-standing tradition for the West Side that tries to bring money and people to the West Side to show everyone what work his organization has done through the year.
"The biggest difference between this year and last year is Tennessee Avenue last year had one tenant," Romano said. "This year, we are 100 percent occupied. The entire block has come back to life."
And there are more things in the work, too.
"In the past couple of years, we've seen a lot of new faces coming to this event. That's people coming from all over the city - South Hills, East End, Kanawha City - to come and celebrate the West Side with us."
Romano and his team aren't the ones going into buildings and remodeling them, but they are the cheerleaders that promote the buildings and try to attract new and local businesses to them once they are completed.
Part of the reason his group wants to revitalize the West Side is because he sees a trend in the next five years of young people moving away from the suburbs of Putnam County back to the urban areas of Charleston.
Proceeds from the event went to Charleston Main Streets to continue its work on the West Side by commissioning public works of art and attracting new businesses to the area.
Reach Jake Jarvis at
jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, Facebook.com/newsroomjake,
304-348-7939 or follow
@NewsroomJake on Twitter.