Sapulpa enjoyed another year of accolades at the Oklahoma Main Street Awards banquet last week, and reached new heights for the community’s Main Street program by taking home the prestigious “Program of the Year” award.
Sapulpa Main Street Director Cindy Lawrence says she’s still in a state of shock regarding the announcement.
“I just never expected it,” she said in an interview with the Sapulpa Times. “We were in the Top 10 for Program of the Year, but I never dreamed that we would be the one called.”
To determine the Main Street Program of the Year, the Oklahoma Main Street Center measures various quality ratings for each local Main Street program. These include meeting the six Standards of National Accreditation and other activities such as attending the annual awards banquet and additional trainings, timely submission of Main Street Award nominations and reinvestment reports, etc. This award is a mark of program excellence, and measured involvement within the program.
Lawrence admitted that even with all that’s happening in Sapulpa these days, she was sure the top prize would go to someone else, as it has year after year.
“There are other programs that are bigger and have a whole lot more staff. I feel like they can get a lot more accomplished—maybe they don’t and I just think they do—but I just never, in a million years, dreamed they would call our name. I was totally shocked,” she said.
Lawrence has been the director for the last twelve years, but has been a part of Main Street since it’s inception in 1990. From the beginning, the group comprised of retailers and community leaders who were determined to preserve and promote Sapulpa’s historic downtown. Cindy says the endeavor has absolutely been a success.
“I’ve got people’s names on my desk that I have to contact today that are looking for locations to come downtown. I met yesterday with a new couple that are in the process of purchasing a building and are moving a new business into downtown. So yeah, it’s going great,” she said.
Sapulpa won 5 of the 9 categories it was nominated for, including the “Outstanding Community Engagement Effort” award, which went to the Route 66 Christmas Chute, an award they were up for last year, but lost to Ponca City.
The other winners were:
Best Visual merchandising: Crossroads Cookery Coffee Lab
Best Adaptive Reuse Project over $25,000: Sugar Llama’s/Bowden Building
Best New Business: Reed Architecture & Interiors
Brean Crosby-Fowler also got Board Member of the Year.
Programs across the state competed in 24 categories representing the “Four Points” of the Main Street Approach: Organization, Promotion, Economic Vitality, and Design. In Sapulpa, Main Street Director Cindy Lawrence says she tries her best to keep those points in mind when it comes to downtown projects. Ultimately, she said it’s more about preserving down for the future.
“To me, it’s not about awards,” she said. “I want the downtown to be the best it can be.”
