Visit Rapid City | Summer Nights

All right, so one place we have to check out is a really cool event that happens every summer on Thursday nights in downtown Rapid City. A spot where families, friends, locals, and tourists get together to enjoy live bands, tons of food and drink options, and an atmosphere you won't want to miss. Today we're meeting with David to get the inside scoop on what goes into making this awesome event happen. Downtown Digs is all about bringing you a behind-the-scenes look at some of the best known local businesses and restaurants in Rapid City and the surrounding areas. I'm Matt Seffner with Seffner Realty and this is Downtown Digs. Hey, what's up, Dave? Hey, Matt, how you doing? Pretty good, man. Hey, welcome to Summer Nights. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Just getting set up here. You want to walk down the street a little bit and check it out? Yeah, I'm excited, man. I'm excited to hear about what all goes into it. Let's go. Give us the rundown. I want to know what kind of goes into Summer Nights, what it all takes to put this thing together. Alright, well, as you can see, an hour ago this was all parking here. Throughout the night from start to finish, we have over 100 volunteers come down and volunteer their time just to kind of make this a community event. The mayor once said that this is a quality of life event for Rapid City. So it's a lot of different moving parts and pieces, but it's well-timed and well-rehearsed. Awesome, man. So I also understand you're a private organization as well, right? So Summer Nights is a private non-profit organization. We pay to set up this entire event. We pay for all the traffic cones, we pay for the sound rigging going up by the stage, and we put this all on, and it's pretty much self-funding. Kind of tell us a little bit about what kind of people come down here as far as, I mean, I know it's all ages pretty much. I mean, anybody can come down. One of the coolest parts and the most gratifying parts for the board that runs this event is to step back and see everybody that shows up, you know, and we'll have doctors and lawyers and somebody that maybe doesn't even have a home standing around having a good time, enjoying the music, enjoying each other's company. And so that's what makes it all worthwhile, is bringing the community together, you know. And for 14 weeks out of the year, we have thousands of people come down and just have an old-fashioned street dance in downtown Rapid City. It's awesome, man. How much better does it get, you know? Yeah, it doesn't get any better than that. All right, so a big question that comes up a lot of times is, you know, how has this changed in the past 12 years? And there's no better person to answer that question than Sandy here. So it was a project by Leadership Rapid City, class of 2007, and then we kicked it off in the summer of 2008. And in our first summer, the entire event fit on this block that you're standing on right now. So it just went from Maine to St. Joe on 7th Street here. We kind of moved it around every few years because we want to accommodate the business owners. The goal of Summer Nights is to bring people downtown and create new customers. We finally settled on the one I think that causes the least inconvenience and brings the most people downtown and benefits downtown. Sure. That's great. You guys do a great job, seriously. You do a wonderful job. And I appreciate you explaining that to us. You're welcome. Pleasure meeting you. Thank you. You too. All right, David. Hey, thank you so much for having us down tonight. Appreciate you showing us around. Let people know where they can go to find more information out about Summer Nights. All right, so our Facebook, just search for Summer Nights on Facebook. And then RapidCitySummerNights.com is our website, which has our band schedule. You'll see everything that's happening on there. Okay. Appreciate it, man. Well, all this good times and all this fun is making me thirsty. Let's go grab a beer. Let's go grab a beer, man. All right. Sounds good. Let's do it. So of course, make sure you like and share this so that other people can find out about the great things happening in downtown Rapid City at Summer Nights. We want to thank our sponsor, Affiliated Mortgage. Make sure you check them out for any of your lending needs. Great company. Go to AffiliatedSD.com to learn more about them. I'm Matt Sefner with Sefner Realty. This is Downtown Digs. We'll see you next time.