Mill Avenue Ambassadors To Help Visitors "Form Memories of Fun"

The Downtown Tempe Community's not just about scraping bird poop off the sidewalk. The Mill Avenue promotion company plans to deploy an army of eager, red-shirted volunteers to help visitors "form memories of fun and an easy-to-navigate destination." The ambassadors will mainly answer visitors' questions, (like, for example, "What happened...

By Ray Stern

August 27, 2008

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The Downtown Tempe Community's not just about scraping bird poop off the sidewalk. The Mill Avenue promotion company plans to deploy an army of eager, red-shirted volunteers to help visitors "form memories of fun and an easy-to-navigate destination."

The ambassadors will mainly answer visitors' questions, (like, for example, "What happened to Long Wong's?") but they'll also be "providing friendly welcomes, distributing maps and information, offering shopping and dining recommendations, conducting limited District historic tours" and reporting any "suspicious activity," according to a DTC press release.

Some of the ambassadors will be provided with electric cars donated by power utility APS for zipping up and down the Avenue.

The one thing they definitely won't do, though, is drive you to Mill Avenue's toughest new competitor, Tempe Marketplace:

Bummer.

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Ray Stern is the former news editor of Phoenix New Times. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Arizona for more than two decades. He's won numerous awards for his reporting, including the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for Investigative Journalism.