Every third Saturday, Downtown Duncanville comes alive with foot traffic throughout the Main Street corridor. Before DuncanSWITCH, locals organized a few successful events with food vendors, kiddie pools, and movie nights, just north of Cox Farms Market on Main Street and also at Armstrong Park, but we weren’t consistent. One of the former organizers of those events, Monte Anderson, has maintained, “the reason we do these events is to drive business into our existing businesses, to give entrepreneurs an opportunity to imagine themselves as Main Street merchants, in the future, and to give local residents an opportunity to recycle things they no longer need or want.” Those reasons have not changed.

This past winter, business owners, long-time and new residents formed a core committee that included City Staff, Pat Weaver, Ken Weaver, Monte Anderson, Daniel Flores, Donna Harris, Cary Efurd, Kasey Cheshier, Mark Dunn, Earl Jones, Mary Love, the Dotti Pennebaker family and Steve Martin at the Chamber of Commerce, along with a host of others. The market came up again as a result of community conversations led by Ginger Hertenstein, because the people really wanted to get it going. In dissecting the who’s and what’s, we realized the market would need to be consistent, whether we had one vendor or one hundred and that we would need to bring it up a bit, in regards to professional quality. We designed logos, t-shirts, electronic banners, social media, email campaigns and worked closely with the City to design the proper form. Monte was heartened that more people wanted to roll up their sleeves and help. We hope the market adds to the quality of life in Duncanville, for many years to come.

The name duncanSWITCH, came from the original train switch name that birthed Duncanville. The first duncanSWITCH street market was on April 19th, 2014. Setting up each event has taught the team of local volunteers many lessons, along the way and we are having a blast setting up the market with minimal effort. It is exciting and rewarding for the volunteers to set up from 5:30 am to 8:00 am organizing duncanSWITCH, and then watching the City’s spirit come together, for a day. On average, the pedestrian count has ranged from 500 to 1,000 shoppers. The recent average number of vendors over the summer, months has been 50 booths and we expect it to grow, as the temperatures cool down and the holidays approach.

We have witnessed neighbors meeting up, residents getting to know the downtown merchants personally, young people visiting their hometown and a new crop of people from surrounding cities, discovering downtown Duncanville. The atmosphere at duncanSWITCH feels great. Many of the vendors like Pizzazzy Pickles, Pynk Pit BBQ, Jaime Salazar at Descuentos 75, Vincent Johnson with Choice Linens and others have become staples at the market. One of a kind fair trade goods, art, jewelry, antiques, specialty foods, clothing, linens and crafts have filled a void that was missing downtown. This has proven to us, that one of our main goals – to develop an incubator system where local entrepreneurs could test the market with minimal overhead – is working. It is awesome to see our goals being met and that our vendors are happy.
​
​ The market has become so successful for the community, the Chamber of Commerce has recently agreed to take ownership of it. We will continue to streamline the vendor setup process and take strategic steps of enhancements to keep the event fresh, exciting and relevant to the Duncanville community.