I'll eat my words about downtown Gilbert

I'll eat my words about downtown Gilbert. Hey, I eat just about everything else there. Why not?

In 2008, I blogged that there were more pressing problems in town to fund than a downtown parking garage. There was plenty of parking then, even if you had to walk a block or two to reach it.

Not now.

The parking garage and just about every lot space is full these days, thanks to the proliferation of trendy restaurants. If the garage wasn't there, it would be impossible to visit most of our favorite haunts. (Actually, without the No Wait app and some other tricks we've learned to find seating easily, we wouldn't be able to eat in downtown Gilbert as much as we do. Most restaurants routinely have half-hour, 45-minute and hour-long waits. And with a four-month-old? Yeah. That doesn't work.)

There is good reason to be skeptical when towns make speculative investments. How many great projects in Arizona have never materialized, or were built and never lived up to their developers' promises? (Gilbert's own Big League Dreams is a great example.)

That said, even the once-derided "million-dollar marble" -- a floating granite ball that's part of the popular Water Tower Park -- has paid off for Gilbert's Heritage District. (It didn't cost anywhere near that, by the way. And the water features there are a critical part of downtown, something to keep families in the area before or after they've eaten.)

So, yeah. I was wrong about building the parking garage. It debuted at just the right time to handle the onslaught of traffic that came, just as the town had predicted.

10 UNIQUE EAST VALLEY SPOTS: