So a little bit of good news out of Chicago. For a few years now I have been posting data showing how visitation at arts organizations compares to 2019 numbers. Some organization types are approaching those pre-Covid numbers, others are struggling to get there.
However, participation in arts and cultural activities has apparently driven pedestrian traffic in Chicago’s Loop in excess of pre-pandemic levels according to Chicago Loop Alliance as reported by WBEZ.
However, it’s arts and culture programming that’s “driving the bus at the moment,” Edwards said.
[…]
“If anybody hasn’t been Downtown lately, they really ought to come down and check it out, because it’s not what they hear on the national news,” he told the Sun-Times recently. “We have more pedestrian volumes than we had in the past. People are using the district more as a social center than they are using it as a business.”
Past CLA studies show that more people attend arts and culture events than the games of all of the city’s professional sports teams combined. Chicagoans are also attending cultural experiences — like Broadway shows and art exhibitions — at a cadence well above the national average, too.
I was interested to read that people are increasingly using the district socially rather than for business. I imagine that is due to the reduction of people working from offices. It is really encouraging then to think that arts and cultural activities have increased pedestrian traffic beyond what they were at when workers were going to and from their offices.
One assumption I wanted to caution against is assuming attendance at arts and cultural institutions has increased above 2019 levels. Other than a quote from the Goodman Theater, there aren’t any claims to that effect. The definition they are using for arts and cultural activities may be broader than what readers may have in mind. There could be a number of Loop organizations who have not seen a return to 2019 levels.
