Phoenix First Fridays removes street closure for vendor market amid public safety concerns

PHOENIX – First Fridays, a long-running cultural event that draws thousands of people to downtown Phoenix once a month, is making changes amid rising public safety concerns.

Specifically, Roosevelt Street won’t close down for the ARTS Market vendor experience for the foreseeable future, organizers revealed Thursday.

“We said ‘foreseeable future’ in the announcement because we don’t know, because we need time to evaluate,” R.J. Price of Downtown Phoenix Inc. told KTAR News 92.3 FM.

Price said the decision to remove the market from the programming was made after “an exhaustive review” of ongoing issues and suggestions from community members and stakeholders.

“What we were able to deduce … is that the current iteration of the street closure on Roosevelt was not working. It was not serving the vast majority of artists. It was not benefiting the brick-and-mortar businesses that make Roosevelt what it is. And it wasn’t safe,” Price said.

This isn’t the first attempt to address concerns about violence in and around the Roosevelt Row Arts District during First Fridays. The Phoenix Police Department implemented a curfew on minors a year ago.

In January, a teenager was shot and killed near Seventh and Garfield streets while First Friday activities were underway around the corner.

“So many public safety resources have been deployed to First Fridays on Roosevelt in response to the rising concerns for public safety and, frankly, the incidents that have happened in close proximity to the event footprint. So, again, we deduced that we had to take it away, at least temporarily, in order to fix it,” Price said of the vendor market street closure portion of the event.

First Fridays will continue without Roosevelt Street closure

The First Fridays art walk got its start in 1994 and now attracts up to 20,000 people on the first Friday of each month. The next event will be May 1.

The small businesses and galleries on Roosevelt Row will continue to participate in First Fridays without the ARTS Market.

“First Fridays are a living, breathing thing that nobody controls, nobody has jurisdiction over that,” Price said. “What we can control, and what we can choose to amend, is that vendor experience. And we collectively came to that conclusion that that was problematic and was not serving everyone’s best interests. So we made the decision to take it away for at least the next few months.”

While the vendor market has been a popular part of the monthly happening, First Friday has a footprint that goes beyond Roosevelt Row.

“Phoenix First Fridays were never intended to be Roosevelt First Fridays,” Price said. “There’s First Fridays activations that happen all throughout the city and throughout downtown: Arizona Center, Herberger Theater Center, Grand Avenue, Melrose, just to name a few. All of our businesses will be open.”

KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Balin Overstolz-McNair contributed to this report.

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