Pam Ames set out the donuts, stacked red clipboards in a neat pile and draped T-shirts across the tables, hoping at least half of the 100 volunteers she needed would appear that sunny Saturday in mid-September.
As executive director of the Arcadia Main Street Program, Ames had landed one of AARP’s coveted Community Challenge grants — $25,000 to help revive a downtown that has been fading for decades. But the grant was about more than money. To keep it, Ames had to prove she could rally her neighbors, show that Arcadia still had enough faith in itself.
That remains her hardest work.
Ultimately, about 30 volunteers showed up at the Main Street office downtown. Armed with the clipboards and Ames’ instructions, they fanned out for the “community walk audit” — marking cracked sidewalks, broken curbs and spots that could use benches — the next step for future improvements.
Though the turnout fell short of what she had hoped, Ames has learned to measure progress in steps. Next month, she’ll try again — more donuts, more clipboards, more T-shirts.
For the past two years, Ames, 57, has led Arcadia Main Street, a nonprofit tasked with marketing and revitalizing the 18-block historic district between Hickory and Magnolia streets. As part of that job, she has taken on the challenge of improving a downtown straining from aging infrastructure, limited resources and the repeated blows of hurricanes that have drained businesses and tested residents’ resolve.
Twenty years ago, Arcadia boasted more than two dozen antique stores that sustained the economy. Today fewer than half remain, after one of the roughest summers in memory.
Merchants expect the hot months to be slow, but this year, the streets were nearly deserted, choked off by road work that had dragged on for two years and kept even locals away.
“The worst summer I’ve seen,” said Michelle Miller, who runs Myshelly’s Kitchen, a café that has anchored downtown for nearly a decade.
Arcadia’s struggles are hardly unique. Across small-town America, once-thriving main streets have declined amid changing economics, big-box retail and the shift to online shopping. All across the country, family-owned businesses with deep community roots have given way to out-of-town investors who have scooped up vacant buildings at steep discounts.
Those problems are exacerbated in Arcadia, where residents are nearly three times more likely to live below the poverty line compared to other Floridians, with half of all Arcadia households earning just 60% of the state median income, according to U.S. Census data.
This leaves businesses reliant on outside dollars and customers to stay afloat.
Just around the corner from the Main Street office, Glenda Lewis was bracing for a $12,000 bill to replace the air conditioning at Antiques & More — an expense she could hardly justify after her slowest summer in more than two decades.
She remembers when Main Street’s efforts were barely visible. Now she points to a new welcome sign, a cleaner park and, most of all, a sense of urgency that hadn’t existed before.
As a volunteer on Main Street’s economic committee, Lewis sees Ames grappling with the near-impossible task of uniting 87 business owners, each convinced they know what downtown needs.
“Pam is good for Arcadia,” Lewis said. “I think she’s tried to do her very best.”
From shopkeeper to Main Street leader
Ames’ commitment to Arcadia isn’t something she discovered when she took the Main Street job. It’s rooted in decades of living, working and investing downtown — and in a conviction that small businesses are worth fighting for because she once ran one herself.
Back in 2001, Ames’ life was changing fast. She and her husband, Andy, adopted a baby boy, while Ames was also chasing a dream she had harbored since childhood, when she’d peek through the windows of downtown shops and picture herself behind the counter.
A lifelong Arcadian, Ames had long admired the brick-and-concrete block buildings dotting the city’s historic center, relics of the town’s founders and the generations of shopkeepers who had scratched out a living there.
Between changing diapers and sterilizing baby bottles, an idea took shape where Ames and her retired mother, Linda Williams, would open a business inside one of those historic buildings — a shop meant to stand apart from Arcadia’s antique-heavy district by offering something locals could use and enjoy.
The Basket Peddler opened on Mother’s Day that same year, offering customized gift baskets for special occasions. Arcadia residents welcomed the new venture with more than 100 sales the first day, a burst of success fueled in part by the family’s deep ties to the community.
Loyal customers followed the mother-daughter team from storefront to storefront throughout that first four years in business — through a name change to the Peddler’s Boutique and eventually to a historic building on Oak Street that the family purchased in 2005.
Built in 1918, the old, brick Schlossberg Department Store structure still carried its age in every corner — paper-insulated wires tucked behind cracked plaster, creaking loft floors and rusted plumbing. It needed more work than it was worth on paper, but it was a chance to claim a piece of downtown and breathe new life into it.
“If you’re going to own an old building,” Ames said, “you really have got to love it.”
Ames and Williams ran their shop for 14 years out of the Oak Street building, often spending way too long talking with customers and, as Ames’ family grew with the adoption of a second son, surviving the slow months with the belief they would turn a big enough profit when things picked up.
They eventually closed shop in 2019 — picking Mother’s Day as their last day — and sold the historic building three years after that.
“When it was all said and done,” Ames said, “the one thing that we miss about being in business was the people.”
Ames steps up in the wake of disaster
For Ames, it was always about the people.
Even after closing the shop, Ames stayed rooted downtown — volunteering for Main Street projects, checking in on business owners and lending a hand whenever Arcadia needed it.
She had even served as president of the Main Street board, giving her a front-row seat to the challenges downtown faced and a reputation as someone who could get things done.
And things needed to get done more than ever after Hurricane Ian hit.
The Category 4 storm tore through the community in September 2022, peeling back roofs, blowing out windows and drenching shops along Oak Street. The damage didn’t end when the winds died down. The Peace River, swollen from Ian’s relentless rain, spilled over its banks and seeped into homes across DeSoto County.
Ames grabbed a broom and helped organize cleanup crews downtown after the storm, but recovery would take more than volunteers. So when she saw a Facebook post about a T-Mobile Hometown the downtown shop owners could put to good use, she decided to apply for it.
Ames had never written a grant before, but she vowed to learn. So she studied examples, researched requirements and poured her knowledge of the community into the application.
It was a big deal when Arcadia won. Nearly two decades earlier, after Hurricane Charley, other towns secured recovery grants, but Arcadia missed out because no one at the Main Street Program had applied, she said. Ames wasn’t about to let that happen again.
The $50,000 not only helped nine business owners repair hurricane-damaged facades, it proved Arcadia could compete and win — and it inspired her to keep going.
Since becoming Main Street’s director, Ames has secured several other grants — including one from Hope DeSoto and another from the Florida Department of State — to fund projects ranging from storefront repairs to a veterans mural and celebration.
“Things have just gone really well since Pam has headed Main Street,” said Mayor Judy Wertz-Strickland, who recently leaned on Ames’ persistence as she pushed through creation of a Community Redevelopment Agency, giving downtown a long-term funding stream for the first time.
That momentum has carried into new projects, too. This past spring, Ames and board member Star McLaughlin hosted the first BizKids event in the Tree of Knowledge Park, where more than a dozen students pitched entrepreneurial ideas — from lemonade stands to one particularly ambitious plan to package rabbit poop as fertilizer.
“There were just all kinds of things they were coming up with,” McLaughlin said.
In two years at the helm, Ames has helped beautify downtown, launch an annual golf tournament and organize business workshops connecting shopkeepers with financing. But her biggest achievement, allies say, may be restoring a sense that Arcadia’s future is still worth investing in.
FDOT project tests Main Street’s recovery
But just as downtown was beginning to recover, another blow landed.
In mid-2023, road crews tore up State Road 70 for a long-delayed drainage project, hemming in Arcadia’s core with barricades and detours. What was supposed to last only a couple of years has now been extended until the summer of 2027, leaving even longtime residents struggling to make it downtown.
Tammy Whitney, who comes in about twice a month with her family to Three Trees Brewery, said the construction has made visits far less frequent.
“That’s the sad thing about it,” she said. “It’s the most beautiful part of Arcadia.”
For merchants, it was a one-two punch — battered by storms, then strangled by road closures.
“Nobody really knew the extent of the construction and how intense it was going to be,” Ames said. “And then when they started tacking on extensions, it made it even that much worse.”
The disruption has already claimed casualties. Miller, who has run Myshelly’s Kitchen for eight years, said the restaurant’s in the red this year despite its prime spot on Oak Street.
“Today it was a ghost town in here,” she said on a slow mid-week day last month. “I had maybe eight or nine tables. That affects the livelihood of my staff. They depend on me. They depend on downtown.”
Ariel Odell, who opened Cowboy Corner in 2022 hoping the annual rodeo would bring steady business to his Western-themed tack shop, couldn’t wait it out. This September he closed and planned to move the business to Ocala, where the larger population promised a steadier market.
Ames acknowledged the pain but urged business owners to look ahead to what the project would eventually deliver — wider sidewalks, less flooding and better lighting.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” she said. “But it’s just that pain right now with little access.”
Not everyone is discouraged.
McLaughlin, the Main Street board member, called the road work just another obstacle to overcome. She and her partner own two antique shops downtown, including Biggar & Biggar Antique Mall, and are already planning to open a third.
Another antique shop owner, Toni Badovinac, said she has been inspired by a slew of new businesses — from a brewery to a dog groomer — that are starting to draw different crowds downtown.
“So there is growth, there is diversity, there is change,” said Badovinac, who owns Glass, Antique or Not and has volunteered with Arcadia Main Street for years. “We have some stores that are closing and going out, and it is a huge loss to us. We are such a tight community that we lean on each other and we work together.”
The community walk audit provided a glimpse of that spirit. After canvassing the streets, the volunteers filed back into the Main Street office, buzzing with ideas — benches here, lighting there.
As they chatted, Ames eyed a stack of folders on her desk detailing plans for future events. She still needed volunteers for each one — the Second Saturday Vintage Market in October, Arcadia Bike Fest in November and a December wine tasting that reliably boosts sales for downtown businesses.
So when Quinn Jones, the city marshal who leads the Arcadia Police Department, joked about taking a break from volunteering, Ames shot him a glance that carried more weight than words, then gave a simple reply:
“Never.”
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
