Farmers market celebrates 40 years in downtown SLO. Here’s what it replaced
Thursday makes the 40th anniversary of the Downtown SLO Farmers Market.
The farmers market, held Thursday evenings in downtown San Luis Obispo, has become a cherished local tradition.
However, it replaced another popular past-time: cruise night.
On Thursday nights, Higuera and Marsh streets were a nonstop parade of chrome and exhaust smoke.
Downtown business owners didn’t like the scene and lobbied the San Luis Obispo City Council around 1980 to shut it down. They complained that people spent more time in their cars than on the sidewalks shopping.
Barricades stopped the cars from entering the downtown area but it took a few years to create something to replace the cruise.
In July 1983, the Business Improvement Association sponsored a Rib Cookoff that brought 700 people to downtown San Luis Obispo.
The farmer’s market opened downtown a week later, and attendance eventually grew to the thousands.
In 1984, Darreld English, the BIA’s Thursday night coordinator, fretted that the association faced the problem of preserving a festive atmosphere while coping with large numbers of people.
“’When we set this whole thing up,” he told the Telegram-Tribune at the time, “it was set up for 300 to 500 people. Now the whole game plan is different. We’ve had to grow more organized.’ ”
Business owners would later complain about smoke from barbecue pits rather than automotive exhaust.
SLO’s cruise night came back to life after the coronavirus pandemic shut down the Downtown SLO Farmers’ Market and people searched for a way to share an experience while social distancing. Facebook groups for cruise nights in other towns such as Paso Robles and Arroyo Grande and other communities started as well.
When Downtown SLO Farmers Market returned with the end of COVID-19 restrictions, cruise night vanished once more.
Glenn Scott wrote this story about SLO’s car cruise tradition, published in the Telegram-Tribune on July 4, 1980.
Downtown cruisin’:
Scene moves on
Shawm Steward always takes the middle lane when he cruises in downtown San Luis Obispo on Thursday nights.
It’s a trick the 19-year-old learned since first making the scene four years ago. Riding the middle lanes of Marsh and Higuera streets keeps him farther from the curbs where the kids hang out, their hands sunk in their pockets but their eyes glued to the chrome.
The side lanes are where the cars screech in and out from the curb and stop to pick up riders. Being in the middle also keeps him farther from the police officers on foot patrol, although Steward claims he learned a long time ago to be straight with the cops.
Steward knows a lot about the subtleties of cruising.
He is no hack at this game. He is an aesthete.
His license plate reads ‘SLO CRUZ,’ and he knows better than to make such sophomoric mistakes as turning from Higuera to Marsh at Nipomo Street, where it’s too crowded.
It’s not Nipomo to him, though; it’s Foster’s, for the hamburger shop. Don’t turn at Foster’s.
Go to Scrubby’s or better yet, try the Fountain. Steward also knows most of the young faces that come staring out of the rolled-down windows at him like heads popping out of a rectangular television screen.
He can tell you whether they’re locals or out-of-towners. What Shawm Steward, connoisseur of chrome, friend of the gasoline dealer and would-be mechanic, does not know is what will happen to his “perfect cruise” beginning next Thursday when city workers set up wooden barricades to stop the crowded convertibles, the pint-sized pickups and the candy-colored Camaros from rolling in unison down Higuera Street.
The City Council’s decision Tuesday to close Higuera, the main commercial strip, from Osos to Nipomo streets from 6 p.m., to midnight has him miffed.
“All it boils down to is one less thing to do,” he said.
Up ahead a girl in a fur-lined coat ran into the intersection of Chorro and Higuera. She screamed in a delighted panic as a car zoomed past.
She reached another car where the driver had stopped for her.
The car behind them was stranded in the intersection. Its driver leaned on his horn.
The guy picking up the girl couldn’t seem to believe she ran into the street. He put his hand to his forehead, shocked, then drove away.
“Girls. I’ve met a lot of girls, all kinds of girls,” said Steward. “I meet a lot of people out here. I make friends and I make enemies sometimes, but not too often.”
He took another lap. As he drove by a cluster of youths in front of Rileys department store, which by then was closed, one of the guys stepped into the street and handed Steward a handmade map through the open window.
It showed Santa Rosa Street between Walnut Street and Foothill Boulevard.
“New cruise street if Higuera and Marsh are closed,” it read.
The light was red. Steward studied the map.
Green. He moved on.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a fast cruise, and if it involves residential areas, people are going to complain even more than this.
“You know, I’ve cruised San Jose and Los Angeles and a few oddball places in the Valley and this is mellow.”
Down the street a police officer who had been waving over cars to talk to the drivers and check for booze paused for a minute.
“They’re either going to try to get through the barricades or they’re going to go somewhere else,” he predicted.
“If they go through, they’re subject to being arrested.”
The officer said, all in all, this final night for cruising Higuera had been quiet.
Steward agreed. “Dead,” he sighed, as he considered the unknown fate of his favorite pastime.
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
