What’s up with the lights of Broadway?

A concerned student messaged us last week asking, “Does anyone know why Broadway has been blacked out the past two nights? It's very unnerving with all these students and patrons walking around in pitch black.”

I hadn’t heard anything about that from anyone else, and neither had the city’s director of engineering, Donna Newman, who I bumped into at the Government Center and asked. She said she’d look into it.

The city owns the city’s streetlights, but the Georgia Power Co. maintains them, so they might know something. I called Georgia Power spokesman Robert Watkins, who doesn’t turn streetlights on or off, but knows who does. He said he’d look into it and call me back.

While we’re waiting for Robert to call, think back about Broadway 25-30 years ago, before there were all these students and patrons out and about after dark. There was little need for streetlights back then. Late at night, the sidewalks were practically empty, except for a few people engaging in varieties of commerce that the chamber doesn’t speak about in annual reports.

Well, Robert called back and said no one had reported any downtown outages to them, either. But to be safe, he would send a crew down to Broadway immediately at dusk to see what’s on and what’s off and to repair whatever might be off.

Thanks, Robert.

At this point, my late grandmother would add that the college students and patrons shouldn’t be out and about late at night anyway. When I was in high school and college, she always told me, “Michael, nothing good ever happens after midnight.”

I never had the heart to tell her that, at that point in my life, just about everything good that had ever happened to me happened after midnight.

Sorry, Grandmother.

Update

Remember when we reported recently that the Welcome Center on Williams, which has been undergoing an extensive renovation, would be reopening in the middle of this month. Well, not so much.

Sam Wellborn, our representative on the Georgia Department of Transportation board, tells me that the company providing a new HVAC system can’t get the unit to the site quite yet, so the grand re-opening won’t happen until the second week of September.

As we said before, you don’t want to open anything in middle Georgia in August until the AC is up and running. That wouldn’t be very welcoming.

This story was originally published August 14, 2016 at 7:46 PM with the headline "What’s up with the lights of Broadway?."