HONESDALE, Pa. — On Main Street in downtown Honesdale, most of the buildings are more than 100 years old. Olivia Santo owns the shop Gather and loves her storefront more than anything but knows it could use some improvements.
"I could use that money to paint the building, fix our awning. There's been a few things that we've been wanting to fix up in this building for a long time," Santo said.
The Greater Honesdale Partnership, the borough's Main Street organization, applied for and received a $50,000 façade grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED).
GHP will now distribute those funds to businesses in the downtown so owners can make exterior improvements to the buildings, like painting or getting new signs.
"The façade improvements are going to be huge because $50,000 in a general targeted area, it's a match grant, so there will be $100,000 flowing through Honesdale," said Lisa Burns, Greater Honesdale Partnership executive director.
Each business will get up to $5,000 to make these improvements, but it is a dollar-for-dollar match, so business owners will have to spend up to $5,000 of their own money, too.
"The $5,000 investment would be so worth it just because we'd be able to spend that little bit of extra money that we maybe we would not necessarily have had the funds to spend and put it right back into the building. It's a big win for the whole town," Santo explained.
Santo plans to apply as soon as the Greater Honesdale Partnership opens the application process. The façade grant is part of GHP's bigger Downtown Revitalization Plan.
"Anybody who has ever visited, they love Honesdale. It's an amazing, quaint little town with authentic beauty. We are not changing the authenticity of the town. We are just repainting and getting things a little spiffed up," Burns said.