From the team at Downtown Decorations Inc.

Summer is here, and with it comes one of the best opportunities of the year to enhance your community. People are outside, exploring their downtowns, visiting local businesses, and looking for reasons to linger a little longer. If your city has been thinking about how to breathe new energy into its civic corridors, now is the time to act. At Downtown Decorations Inc., we’ve had the privilege of working with cities across the country to do exactly that, and we’ve seen what a difference thoughtful, well-placed décor can make.

The concept isn’t new, but its impact never gets old: when you design spaces with people in mind, people show up. As the Project for Public Spaces has long championed, great civic corridors are destinations. They create identity, foster community pride and invite residents and visitors alike to feel something when they walk through them. The question is: how do you get there?

Here are a few of our favorite tools.

Light Pole Banners: Your Downtown’s Unsung Wayfinding Heroes

Before someone can fall in love with a district, they have to know it exists. Custom light pole banners are one of the most underrated (and cost-effective) ways cities can do two things at once: brand a corridor and guide people through it.

Picture the last time you walked into a neighborhood that felt cohesive. Where the signage, colors, and design language all told the same story. That feeling of continuity is intentional, and it’s powerful in building your community’s identity. Pole banners achieve this at scale. They can label distinct districts within a downtown (the Arts District, the Historic Quarter, the Waterfront), give visitors a visual anchor to orient themselves, and signal to everyone that this is a place that’s been invested in.

For municipalities managing multiple corridors or neighborhoods, a well-designed banner program is one of the clearest ways to say: “You’ve arrived somewhere worth being.” That message matters to locals who take pride in their community and to visitors deciding whether to stop and explore.

Topiary Letters: Put Your City on the Map (Literally)

In corner two, MainStreet Fabric is Downtown Decorations Inc.’s premium digital banner solution. Built on a dual-ply, acrylic-coated polyester base, it bridges the gap between the rugged strength of marine acrylic and the vivid photographic output of vinyl—delivering the best of both worlds for communities that want stunning visuals and year-round reliability.

There’s something undeniably magnetic about large-scale green letter installations, they’re photogenic, they’re joyful and they give people a reason to seek them out.

We installed a set of topiary letters spelling “LYH” for the City of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the response has been exactly what great placemaking looks like in practice. Those three letters have shown up on government pages, in the social media feeds of local influencers, and in the photos of tourists discovering the city for the first time. They’ve become a symbol for Lynchburg pride that residents have genuinely embraced.

That’s the thing about topiary letters: they do something a street sign never can. They invite people to be somewhere, to take a photo, to share it, and to come back. They create a destination within a destination. Cities that are trying to drive more foot traffic to a specific corridor will find that a well-placed set of letters can drive this naturally, without a huge campaign.

People want beauty, and they want to feel proud of where they’re from. Topiary letters deliver both.

Topiary Animals: When a Neighborhood Gets a Little Wild

Speaking of things that make people stop in their tracks, let’s talk about topiary animals. If you want to generate genuine community buzz, few things do it quite like giving your downtown a cast of characters.
We partnered with the Downtown Raleigh Alliance to install a trio of topiary dinosaurs across downtown Raleigh, and the response has been dino-mite, to say the least. The three dinos—Bex the T-Rex, Pterry the Pterodactyl, and Trish the Triceratops—were strategically placed to mark the way between museums, local businesses and attractions, turning a simple walk-through downtown into an adventure. “Part of the reason for doing these dinosaurs is to just bring that fun, whimsy, memorable, kind of placemaking vibes to downtown Raleigh,” said Lucy McInnis, events and development director of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance. “And really add on to our long list of those attractive, vibrant public spaces that serve the community’s needs and really make downtown great.” Newsobserver.com

The community ran with it. The Downtown Raleigh Alliance invited residents to capture their “stego-selfies” and tag #DTRDinos for a chance to be featured, turning the installations into a living social media campaign that just happened organically. Each dinosaur was given its own name, personality and even preferred pronouns, making them feel like genuine members of the community. The city dressed them up for holidays, hosted events around them (including renting an actual Jurassic Park jeep for residents to cruise by for photos), and watched as what started as a décor installation became a full-blown cultural moment. CBS17

This is what topiary animals do at their best: they spark engagement that goes far beyond the installation itself. They give communities something to rally around, joke about, post about, and show off. And when that happens, foot traffic follows.

Reval Lighting: Your Corridor, Every Season

For cities with a bigger picture budget or an upcoming infrastructure project, we want to introduce you to something that keeps working for you year-round: Reval permanent lighting.

We recently completed a Reval installation in Providence, Rhode Island, just in time for Pride. With 20+ preset color programs (and more on the way with future software updates), these permanent pole lights can shift from rainbow Pride colors to spooky Halloween oranges, festive Christmas reds and greens, or St. Patrick’s Day emerald at the tap of a button. Think of it like the Empire State Building, it changes colors for everything from holidays to sports championships, and it’s become part of the city’s identity as a result. Your downtown’s main corridor can do the same.

Beyond the obvious visual appeal, there’s a practical case for lighting that often gets overlooked: well-lit streets make people feel safer, and safer streets mean more people walking them after dark. That’s good for business, good for community life, and good for the overall vitality of a corridor.

Planner’s Tip: If your city is already planning to rework its electrical grid, replace aging light poles, or update traffic infrastructure downtown, that is the ideal moment to invest in Reval permanent lighting. The heavy lifting is already being done—adding intelligent, programmable lighting to the project is a smart efficiency play that saves time, money and disruption down the road.

Let’s Build Something Worth Talking About

Whether you’re looking to brand a corridor, create a destination, or light up your downtown for every season, Downtown Decorations Inc. is ready to make it happen. We’d love to talk about what’s possible for your community this summer.

Reach out to us, we’re always happy to walk through ideas and share what’s worked in cities just like yours.

Here’s to a summer that gives people a reason to get outside.

Request a free quote or call us at (315) 432-0646. We’d love to bring your vision to life!