Revitalizing Brookline: Businesses and Reasonable Hours

One of the most common complaints I hear about the city of Pittsburgh, both from visitors and natives, is that it shuts down at 6 PM. The city becomes something of a ghost town after the work day is through, and becomes populated by an entirely different type of person--a less savory type, if you will.

Efforts have been made to change this over the past five or ten years, but we're still not there yet. Go to other major cities, like Indianapolis, IN, and you'll find the city bursting with activity into the wee hours. This doesn't happen in Pittsburgh, where everyone deserts the downtown area after work.

Brookline exemplifies this issue in microcosm. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the advantage downtown does, of being full to bursting with people during business hours. Part of the problem with Brookline as it stands is that it's difficult to have a vibrant business district when all of the businesses are only open while people are at work. Walk down Brookline Blvd. any day after six o' clock and you'll see CVS, the pizza joints, and bars open--that's about it.

Okay, it's fair to say that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much, really. And it's not remotely an exaggeration to point out that the entire tenor of the boulevard changes when everything but the bars close down. People have pointed out by way of commenting on earlier articles that in the evenings, the boulevard is full of shady people (often dismissed as "shady kids," but just as often it's shady young adults). The weekly Zone Six community police report has regular (not every week, but often enough) reports of people and businesses being robbed later in the afternoons and evenings, and I argue that the reason this happens is because not enough businesses are open during that time, and not enough people are on the streets.

Crime, you see, only flourishes when there are no witnesses.

We need some of the cultural businesses on the boulevard to have realistic hours. It's difficult to visit a tailor when you're at work. What's the point of having a hot dog stand or pretzel restaurant when most of your patrons are at their day jobs? Sometimes I might like to stop and get flowers from my wife--gee, it'd be great to do that on the boulevard if the florist weren't closed. Perhaps the biggest offender is also one of my favorite businesses on the boulevard: Cannon Coffee. This business should be open nightly until at least ten o'clock. It's in the evenings when cafes of this sort flourish, and yet Cannon closes down at seven every night (according to its posted hours). A cafe like Cannon needs to build itself as a social hub, where people can come together for meetings, business or social, and just enjoy good company and good conversation.

I know that Cannon sometimes stays open past its advertized hours, but staying open on occasion past your posted hours doesn't count--businesses need to have regular hours when the majority of the working public can get to them. Nor do I mean to pick on or single out Cannon Coffee. As I've said, they're probably my favorite business on the boulevard, and if they were open later, I'd be there far more often than I am, for practical reasons.

I'm sure many of the more successful offenders don't feel the need to expand their hours, as they're paying their bills and making a profit. But consider: most of their customers are likely the owners and employees of other boulevard businesses, and not the Brookline public at large. As it stands the hours kept by many of the businesses on the boulevard serve to create a sort of self-sustaining closed system. Looking at the books might say, "Well, someone is patronizing them," but if that someone is only other business owners and employees, we don't have a flourishing economic revitalization happening.

Hopefully, this doesn't need to be further illustrated.

I understand that businesses exist to make money, and if they're making money, they might not see a need to expand their hours. There has been, however, a lot of talk on the boulevard lately about civic pride, about small businesses taking pride in the community. And yes, staying open later means more overhead and expenses. But if a number of business owners got together and agreed to all increase their hours at once, you'd see a nigh immediate change in the culture of the boulevard, because people other than bar flies and shady characters might be drawn back.

The more decent people you have around, the fewer of those shady characters you will see--it will no longer be profitable to cause mischief or commit crimes when there's a goodly number of decent folk strolling down the boulevard and keeping an eye on things just by virtue of the fact that they are there. This will then have a chain reaction effect--as the boulevard becomes more vibrant, this will attract new businesses, which in the end is what's really needed.

People need to get out of their homes in Brookline and do something other than events held in local church social halls, and to do that, they need places to go. Businesses are going to have to expand their hours if Brookline wants to bounce back.