PHILIPSBURG — Philipsburg Borough is getting into the Christmas spirit, starting with the annual Philipsburg Christmas Festival on Saturday, Dec. 2, to be held all day long.
KANE — After nearly five years of planning and construction, the PA Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship has officially opened its PA Wilds Media Lab in Kane.
This story appears in the May 27-June 2 edition of The Centre County Gazette
PHILIPSBURG Pat Romano, owner of the We Are Inn in Philipsburg, has a message for the public: “We are … back!”
Romano sought and was granted permission by the Philipsburg Borough Council to have a fireworks display on July 10. Fireworks are a beloved tradition of Philipsburg’s annual Heritage Days, which was canceled this year because of COVID concerns.
The Heritage Days committee must begin planning the festival months in advance and canceled when mandates and restrictions were still uncertain.
“Once the Heritage Days committee announced they were canceling, we sat back and thought, ‘We gotta do something,’” Romano said.
COVID-19 dealt a “devastating blow” to Centre County’s tourism and hospitality industry in 2020, with hotels seeing a nearly $50 million drop in revenue from a year earlier and the resulting local hotel occupancy tax falling by $2.7 million, Happy Valley Adventure Bureau President and CEO Fritz Smith said.
But Smith and others are hopeful that they are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel and that optimism was on display Thursday as the Adventure Bureau awarded the second round of 2020 tourism grants to six events and projects planned for 2021.
“It was great to see the Palmer Museum of Art opening yesterday,” Smith said. “It’s great to see the students returning to campus. It’s great that we’ve held a couple of basketball tournaments over the last couple of weeks and that has helped elevate the hotel occupancy in the area. We were almost halfway full in our hotels this past weekend. After a very dismal December and January, it’s great to see some progress in