FRESNO, Calif. (KGPE/KSEE) – Santa Clauses are coming to town, more specifically the city of Fresno, on Saturday for the second annual Santa Pub Crawl. This is an event that allows people to dress up as Santa Claus in their own way and hop to different venues in the Tower District in Fresno hosted by […]
A Fresno City Council redistricting map that will go for a final vote next week has many Tower District residents voicing concerns about the new dividing lines.
FRESNO
At first, few in the neighborhood paid attention to the churchgoers filing into the Tower Theatre on Sunday mornings.
It was pre-pandemic and just another audience at the historic Art Deco theater with its neon orb atop an 80-foot tower. But as Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theater across the street went dark, the gay bar silent and the Tower District’s lively sidewalks emptied, the devout continued to meet for months, drawing local ire.
In January it became public that Adventure Church was buying the theater, the neighborhood’s namesake and economic anchor.
“That’s when things went wackydoodle,” said Heather Parrish, co-director of the Rogue, an annual fringe arts festival and one of the organizers of an effort to stop the sale. “This is the historic center of progressive bohemia in Fresno. An evangelical church operating in the heart of it strikes at the culture we’ve built for decades.”
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Along Fern Avenue in the Tower District, businesses are boarded up, some lined with graffiti. There’s trash piled in the doorways.
But on this sunny Saturday afternoon, volunteers move brooms along the sidewalk and sweep the debris into boxes. There’s an upbeat feeling about their work.
Tyler Mackey, executive director of the Tower District Marketing Committee sweeps a sidewalk on Fern Avenue on a volunteer clean up day.
One of the cleaning crew is Kacey Auston. She grew up in the Tower and is now leasing the former Bank of America building on this street. It’s still empty but she plans on opening a marijuana dispensary called Cookies Fresno.