Ya Gotta Believe

I have this app called Time Hop and each day it reminds you of events and photos from your past.

It’s pretty cool.

Well last week, an old column I had written for the Delray Beach Times resurfaced. It was from 1993 and it was in the immediate aftermath of Delray winning its first All America City Award in Tampa.

I wrote about how the city planned to capitalize on the win with a marketing blitz that would hopefully capture the eyes of investors looking to build in Delray and companies that may want to move to Delray.

What followed were All America city buttons, bumper stickers, license plates, key chains etc.

The effort may have seemed hokey but it was effective and the results produced positive press and civic pride.

Let’s spend a minute on those two things: positive press and civic pride. They are often linked together—and it makes sense. Positive press creates civic pride.

So in 1993, when residents saw their city make the cover of Florida Trend, they felt good about their city. The headline on the magazine: Florida’s Best Run City.

It doesn’t get better than that.

Only it did—for awhile at least.

Delray in the 90s and early 2000s seemed to to be a magical place.  Every year seemed to be better than the last.

There was a confidence about the town, a sense that by working together the community could accomplish anything it set its mind too.

Want to lower the crime rate?

Ok, let’s commit to community policing.

Want to create a vibrant downtown?

Let’s invest in a streetscape (Decade of Excellence) and innovative policy (Downtown Master Plan) and events and  sure enough—with a ton of hard work— we have the “it” downtown in the region and beyond.

There were some amazing civic projects too: Old School Square, the Sandoway House, the Cason Cottage and the Spady Museum.

There were true collaborations with the Achievement Center for Children and Families, the Beach Property Owners Association, the formation of the West Settlers Historic District, the opening of the Youth Enrichment Vocational Center, successful bids for the Davis and Fed Cups, model beach renourishment projects, the founding of the county’s first land trust, the introduction of public art, dozens of citizen engagement initiatives and landmark programs designed to help Delray Beach schools.

Looking back, civic pride and confidence may be the key factor in success.

As Tug McGraw, the great reliever for the Mets once said: “Ya gotta believe.”

And we did.

We believed.

We acted.

We experimented.

We were entrepreneurial and we took calculated risks. We didn’t fear precedents; we wanted to set them.

I recently watched an ESPN documentary that examined last year’s Wimbledon match up between Delray’s Coco Gauff and Venus Williams, who also played a lot of tennis over the years in Delray.

Two things struck me.

One was Coco’s confidence that she could play with Venus. She believed that she belonged.

You don’t win without that belief.

Second, as ESPN’s Chris Fowler interviewed Coco at our downtown tennis center, I recalled the decision made to keep the center downtown and add a stadium court. That took confidence. It was a prescient decision.

And because of it, a young champion was able to walk to the courts and dream. A generation later, she’s talking from the veranda of the pro shop with ESPN about what it was like to beat a legend on centre court at Wimbledon. Very cool.

Anyway, this is a riff on confidence, civic pride, dreams, aspiration and accomplishment.

Wouldn’t it be nice to do/have all of those things again?

As we sit home enduring this awful pandemic, we ought to spend some of our time dreaming about a better future and taking some steps to make those dreams come true.
We are going to need bold new ideas to survive the post coronavirus world, which will surely be different.
The first order of business is to survive. The second is to recover and thrive. The cities that dream and act will be the ones that thrive.
The ones that wallow in despair and enable dysfunction will sink.
Let’s be the former.
Ya gotta believe.