The Village of Bellaire made some improvements to downtown to allow for locals and visitors to social distance.
“It’s a win, win for everybody, for all of the visitors, for our businesses,” says Louis Wenzel, chairperson for the Bellaire Downtown Development Authority (DDA).
With limited capacity indoors, the DDA wanted to create an outdoor space for the more than 4,000 visitors they see every summer.
“That’s a pretty big number and with the limited capacity in a lot of the stores and a lot of the restaurants, we needed to have some place for these people to go,” says Wenzel.
That’s when the village and local businesses owners came together to designate these three locations as outdoor seating areas.
Wenzel says, “We purchased all of the tables, the chairs, the umbrellas and people love it, it’s great, it gives them a place to move about and not be on top of each other.”
Wenzel hopes this will allow locals and visitors to enjoy the village safely.
“We didn’t want them to come and see long lines of people saturating the sidewalks, so this way they can come, they can sit, they can wait.”
Jade Johnson, a manager at Shorts Brewing Company in Bellaire, says the outdoor seating helps, as their restaurant is currently reservation only and has limited indoor capacity:
“It definitely limits the businesses that we’re able to get, but to go has been really popular before the seating and even more so now with the seating downtown,” says Johnson.
Now, people can grab their food or drink to go and still enjoy the downtown.
“People seem to really take to it and really want to take your takeout food, which also helps supports all of our businesses,” says Johnson.
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