DOWNTOWNS

It was in mid-1987 when Vertis and I finished the groundwork to develop several recent purchases of El Dorado's Downtown Real Estate. Over several years we had acquired most of the property in the 100 block of Jefferson-Main Street, and we had just cleared the burned-out shell of an old department store. The space was being used as a parking lot.

We were in Santa Fe, New Mexico where our Daughter was living at the time. Santa Fe has a great downtown, and we have copied several things that have been successful there. We realized you can't reinvent the wheel when you are trying to add something to a downtown. Someone, somewhere, has already added it to their downtown. That is if it is working. There are two items we have in Downtown El Dorado that we copied from Santa Fe. One, "Off the Rails" an antique railcar hit breakfast-lunch place in the heart of El Dorado's Downtown. We actually got the idea when we were on vacation in Santa Fe, where they had taken an antique train caboose, gutted it and made it into a Welcome Center. I thought it was a great idea, and when we returned home, I got on the Internet and in about 15 minutes I found a small company in North Carolina that........

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