Fifth Saturday coming up next weekend

Published 3:00 am Saturday, August 22, 2015

This month’s Fifth Saturday event on the Square in Downtown Troy will be geared toward the college-aged students living in Troy.

Leigh Anne Windham with the City of Troy while the event will still be family-oriented, the Downtown Committee opted to go with a band that would appeal to university students in efforts to get them down to The Square to see what their community has to offer.

“We’re going to start this one with an open-mic like we did the very first Fifth Saturday because people responded well to it and really, really enjoyed it,” Windham said. “We’ll do that for an hour and a half and then BlackBerry Breeze will start playing. We invite people of all ages, families and everyone else to come out to participate, but we chose BlackBerry Breeze as the band because we really want to attract university students. We did some research and found out that they were appealing to a majority of the students at the university.”

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Windham said the games featured on The Square during the last Fifth Saturday event will also make a comeback. Restaurants and downtown retailers will also have specials going on for those coming out Aug. 29.

“We’ll have games out again,” Windham said. “We’ll have cornhole and bowling and ladder balls … Our restaurants will have food and drink specials during the event this day. We’ll probably only do the tents once a year or twice a year at most. They had a great response for the tents. The downtown retail establishments should have sales and specials going on as well. We’ll be extending an offer to the retail businesses to extend their hours, but we aren’t sure if that will happen or not.”

Fifth Saturday is a partnership between the City of Troy and the Pike County Chamber of Commerce’s Downtown Committee, and Windham said it is an opportunity for the city to showcase and highlight some of its best attributes.

“Fifth Saturday is another opportunity for us to be able to offer students to do on the weekends,” Windham said. “This is something else to offer them and show them what Troy has to offer for them. We want the students to feel at home in Troy. This is a great event for them because typically you see in college towns when the community and the students mix and all at events, students start feeling more like they are at their second home. It gives them an opportunity to spend time with the locals. There are so many different shopping and eating venues downtown, and we want to make sure we bring them down regular so they are aware that they are down there.”

Open-mic will be from 4 until 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 29, with headliner BlackBerry Breeze taking the stage at 6 p.m. Windham said the band will be playing until 9 p.m.

“Everyone is welcome to bring lawn chairs and blankets anything to be more comfy sitting out on The Square,” Windham said. “We’ll have table and chairs out on The Square but we can only put so many. We had some people bring chair to the last event and it was very successful.”

Those coming to the event are advised not to bring coolers.