The 2 Sides of Downtown El Paso

The 2 Sides of Downtown El Paso

Welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. I'm Leah Peña. And I'm John Peña, and in this episode we're going to break down the two different sides of downtown El Paso. Hi, thank you so much for checking out the YouTube channel. In this episode

we're going to break down what downtown is like, because a lot of people ask me what is the El Paso downtown like? And the honest answer is that there's kind of two sides to the downtown. Where we are right now is San Juancito Plaza. We're on kind of the front side of the downtown, and this area is awesome. We've

got the plaza here, which is beautiful. The West Star building was just built. We've got the stadium over here. They're building the Children's Museum. There's a lot of great restaurants. Like the front side of downtown is pretty beautiful and pretty happening. Then there's kind of the back side of El Paso downtown, and

that side is actually a little less developed. And it was pretty developed back in the day. A lot of people lived downtown, so a lot of the retail was here. I'm sure a lot of housing was here, but as homes started to be developed on the, you know, the East, the Northeast, people kind of left downtown. And that kind of

backside of downtown, you're gonna see, is still kind of scrappy. And there's still a lot of work that is kind of yet to be done there. And so we thought it would be interesting to kind of show you the difference between the front side and the back side. And so this video is going to be all about that.

Behind me is the downtown public library. It's in the midst of a facelift. This is what our taxes go to in El Paso, and we're happy to support this type of development in downtown. Absolutely, and it's a good example of kind of the front side of our downtown. Hopefully the back side starts to get a lot of this

going too. All right, so we're standing in front of West Star Tower. This thing, it's almost done. They're starting to put in some restaurants on the bottom story. There's a steakhouse right over here. And Leah, what are you excited about? I am really excited about Shishito. I'm probably not saying it right. The new

sushi restaurant, which is the number one sushi restaurant in Mexico City, is opening here in our West Star Tower. So I'm standing here on the more developed side of downtown El Paso, and behind me is Ellamy. Ellamy is one of our favorite restaurants in downtown. Gourmet tacos. The chef here won semi-finalist for the

James Beard Award, and there's many fabulous restaurants. This is just one of our favorites. Okay, so now I'm kind of on this other side of the downtown. So maybe it's fair to kind of call it the less developed side of downtown, because there's nothing derogatory or bad about it. It's just it's not as developed as

kind of the front side is. But as you can see, there are some meaningful buildings back here. I'm standing in front of the courthouse. I mean this building gets a lot of views. There's a police station right behind me, and so there's still a lot of development here. It's just not so much in the nature of

like retail and like fancy new restaurants or housing options and things like that. But I do suspect that might be about to change. I'm standing here across the street from the courthouse, and behind me you'll see the Garrison. The Garrison is one of our newest bars. It's been open about a

month. They have amazing craft cocktails. We were fortunate enough to get to come here about a week ago with some friends. Loved the the atmosphere, live music going on, and we had an opportunity to talk with the manager recently, and he is really excited about the location and what's happening here in this area in

El Paso. So the Garrison was a great example of something new in this area. Behind me you'll see the Tap Lounge. This is an iconic dive bar in El Paso. It was established in 1956, and it's definitely something to check out. Okay, so now I'm still kind of on that undeveloped side of El Paso. I'm just south of San

Antonio and Stanton, but this is an awesome example because this building has obviously been renovated. They're about to open up like a glasses shop or something like here, but then you can see on the sides of this, like we've still got like these older kind of buildings. So like I said, it's a it's an

interesting space back here. There's a lot of opportunity to say the least. All right, so one fun thing about downtown, no matter where you are, is scooters. Now, I know in a lot of cities the scooters have a bad rap and people go nuts, and they probably kind of go nuts here too. What's your experience of

scooters been so far? Well, there was quite a crash with a bicycle and a scooter one night when we were having dinner in downtown, but otherwise people are pretty respectful with the scooters, and they ride them on the sidewalks, the streets, all over. Yeah, for sure. The other thing that that I like to think about is

we read somewhere that the most common injury you're going to get from a scooter is you're gonna you're gonna like fall into a curb and break your collarbone. So how well do you think you'll do it riding on a scooter? Well, so far we've not ridden the scooters because John is sure that I will break my collarbone or something else. It's highly likely that if Leah rides a scooter

there's going to be a broken collarbone. Okay, so thank you so much for checking out this episode, and honestly, you know, we've been kind of pitching it as, ah, there's kind of two sides of El Paso. It's really not true. I mean, honestly, yeah, one part of El Paso is a little bit newer and fresher and more

modern-looking, and yeah, the other side is a little bit older and not as developed. But as you can see, that's changing. Like, El Paso is a very, very popular place for relocating buyers, and we're gonna see the downtown develop, and we may see more urban living. You know, who knows what's to come, but that's one of the

super exciting things about El Paso is that it's a fresh city. It's like up and coming. Things are changing. Some things stay the same. We're on El Paso Street. This street has been here since 1859 when the city was originally surveyed and platted. As you can see, there's lots of these great little mercados here,

great prices, great friendly people. This street epitomizes El Paso because on one end it connects you to the Santa Fe Bridge, where you can literally go into Juarez and back, and then on the other end it kind of dead-ends into the Hotel Paso del Norte, one of the newest renovations that we've seen. So this is a

great street. If you're not from El Paso, if you come, you definitely got to check out El Paso Street because it's a great kind of picture of what El Paso is all about. So we hope that this episode has been kind of informative. We hope that we've shown you some some great pictures and some different ideas about

what the downtown is all about, and we'll see you in the next video.