WICHITA — When downtown consultants with Goody Clancy discussed the area where the Coleman manufacturing plant used to be at the southeast corner of Second and St. Francis, they dubbed it Old Town West.
“We’re afraid . . . that it will be called Old Town West now forever,” says downtown dweller and Wichita State University marketing professor Cindy Claycomb.
“We think that it ought to be called the Coleman District.”
The plant is now razed, and Coleman and the Rotary Club of Wichita are planning an urban park there.
There are plans for other business and residential developments nearby, and the city is redoing St. Francis to make it a two-way street and adding landscaping along it. The Coleman outlet and museum is there as well.
“That could be a nice corridor,” Claycomb says of the whole area.
She was part of a group of people who helped name the Redbud Trail instead of simply referring to it as that new bike path where the railroad tracks used to be.
“It wasn’t that hard,” she says. “We just said, ‘Everybody needs to call it the Redbud Trail,’ and we did, and it worked.”
Claycomb isn’t exactly taking on the Coleman District as a cause, but she says, “It needs its own designation apart from Old Town.
“We’re trying to give distinctiveness to each of these neighborhoods or districts in the downtown area.”
Claycomb is open to other names as well.
“If somebody else thought of something else, that would be nice.”