Our downtown square area needs a total renovation and some new businesses. Please someone save our downtown from death.

— Rant and Rave, received Oct. 30, 2019

Moultrians love our downtown, and probably nobody loves it any more than Amy Johnson, the city’s downtown development director. Under a variety of different titles, she’s been the city government’s point person for improving downtown for about 20 years. Whatever good has happened in downtown in the last two decades, she probably had her hands on it.

We can only imagine how mortified she is at reading the above rant.

Our downtown is not dying. Projects are under way that will continue to beautify it and to make it more attractive to new businesses and residents. That is not to say those projects are proceeding as quickly as we all might wish, but they are moving along — as The Observer has reported.

We walked through downtown Wednesday after that rant came in, with an eye to prove it right or wrong. The ranter seemed to describe downtown as specifically the courthouse and the buildings across from it. Johnson would say downtown is much bigger, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re calling it the nine complete blocks with the courthouse at the center, plus any buildings directly across the street from those blocks. It’s a big square bordered by First Street West, First Avenue North, Second Street East and Second Avenue South, including both sides of those streets.

Downtown buildings contain several rooms on the second floor. Many are apartments. Throughout the downtown district, Johnson said, there are 26 apartments with eight more under development in the former Belk-Hudson building. Signs on some downtown buildings seem to indicate businesses on the second floor, but we couldn’t tell if they were still in operation so we didn’t count anything that wasn’t on the ground floor.

With that in mind, we found 128 buildings/businesses in the nine-block downtown area. Of those locations, 31 were vacant, and about a half-dozen of those might be termed dilapidated.

Some of the vacancies have plans in the works:

• The former CitiTrends building on Main Street at Central Avenue will house a welcome center. The architect is still finalizing plans before work can begin.

• The former Belk-Hudson building on Central Avenue has been stabilized, and the developer is working on it now. He wants to get eight apartments upstairs before he starts work downstairs, Johnson said, but he plans the downstairs space to be food or retail.

• The former Sportsman Restaurant on First Street Southeast has been slated for demolition for years. It’s part of a long-term plan for downtown renovation, but it is also a consideration as the building beside it is renovated to house a new restaurant, the Pin and Cleaver. Interactions between the two projects have held up the Sportsman’s demolition, but Johnson said the city hopes to have it under way before the end of the year. Meanwhile, an upgrade to the parking lot behind the former restaurant is expected to start the first or second week of January.

• The former YMCA, on First Street at First Avenue Southwest, is on a list to be demolished, Johnson said, but she didn’t have any details. The building has long been vacant and is now marked off with yellow caution tape.

But if one-fourth of the area’s 127 spaces are vacant, that means three-fourths are occupied. Moultrie’s downtown contains a vibrant array of businesses: seven hair salons, six attorneys’ offices, four bank buildings and seven other financial firms, nine working restaurants with a 10th to open soon and the Pin and Cleaver will make 11. Lazarus Department Store is probably the biggest store downtown, but it’s joined by 22 other retail establishments from pawn shops to antiques to clothing boutiques.

Several new businesses have opened just this year.

On top of the everyday businesses, downtown Moultrie will soon host two of its three biggest events of the year. Lights! Lights! on Thanksgiving Night will bring 10,000 to 15,000 people downtown to see the Canopy of Lights turned on, Johnson said, and the Christmas Parade on Dec. 12 is also expeced to draw a large crowd. (The other big event is Spring Fling in April.)

There’ll be a smaller festival next Saturday, Nov. 9, with sidewalk sales, a chili cook-off sponsored by the Moultrie Masonic Lodge, and Music Under the Magnolia with The Tams.

Those are not the signs of a downtown in its death throes.

Credit for the success of downtown doesn’t go only to Johnson. She’s quick to point to the Downtown Development Authority, Downtown Moultrie Tomorrow and the Downtown Moultrie Association, three groups that each work in their own ways to benefit downtown.

So, if you’re looking for someone to save downtown Moultrie, they’re the ones who are already doing it.