The Sept. 12 shooting has some Sacramentans wondering if the Second Saturday Art Walk is going to go the way of K Street’s Thursday Night Market.

According to Michael Picker, The Thursday Night Market was inspired by an event in San Louis Obispo and was intended to be a small-scale street fair people could stop by on their way home from work, but it grew to attract crowds far larger than anticipated as people went home first, picked up their families and then returned to the market.

Picker, who was chief of staff for Mayor Joe Serna Jr. when Thursday Night Market was introduced, both the Thursday Night Market and Second Saturday Art Walk became victims of their own success.

“Everybody plans for what can go awry,” Picker said, “but sometimes too much goes right, and you get too many people.”

But Rob Kerth, executive director of the Midtown Business Association, said the two events share many things, but they remain different.

“I’m not sure that we’ve got something going wrong here,” Kerth said. “There’s a lot of folks showing up, and they have a good time, and any number of businesses say it’s their most important day of the month.”

The key difference between the two, according to Michael Ault, executive director of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership – which produced the Thursday Night Market – is that Second Saturday has a much greater focus and involves the business community more.

“At the end of Thursday Night Markets, many retailers weren’t even open because they weren’t finding it a successful draw to their businesses because their voice wasn’t utilized,” Ault said.

With Second Saturday, Ault said, there is much more focus, and both the business and the community are committed to making it work.

“Second Saturday started off as an event to drive people to art galleries, and it has really evolved into a social scene,” Ault said, “and it’s a wonderful nexus where it’s gone, but we need to figure out how to make it grow and how to grow effectively.”

Picker advised looking into how other major cities handle their big events and see what can be learned from their experience.

Kerth said the MBA has been studying events in other cities, including San Francisco, Old Pasadena and Berkeley, and there are several steps that need to be taken to make Second Saturday a better event.

“We need to get parking out of the neighborhoods so people aren’t walking through them and being noisy and causing problems,” Kerth said, adding that in the future, the MBA will be posting better signage and lighting as well as passing out pamphlets at venues to inform visitors of nearby off-street parking he said many are unaware of.

In an effort to get teens to go home after 10 p.m., Kerth said the MBA is contacting local high schools and encouraging them to get the message out to students.

“We did that this month, and we got a response from about four schools,” Kerth said. “We’re going to push much harder next month ... but we’re not going to get all the kids to go home. We know that.”

It was an over-concentration of teens looking for a social atmosphere that largely contributed to the death of Thursday Night Markets, according to Picker.

“When large groups of teens started showing up, it turned away from being a family event,” Picker said. “That was hard for us. It was a turning point. How do you get teens to go home? If you push them to go home, they want to defy authority.”

Picker said throwing more police at the problem didn’t help, but running street sweepers down the venue did – until resources were stretched too thin.

“I think that’s what’s going on with Second Saturday,” Picker said. “It’s not a crime issue, it’s a population management issue. Unfortunately, this time there was a shooting.”

Kerth acknowledged that the MBA sees problems with the population at the event, which ebbs and flows during the night.

The crowds peak at about 9 p.m., he said, then they drop off until about 11 p.m., when they begin to grow again.

“The chances of a 17-year-old having a good outcome to their night after 10 p.m. goes down,” he said.

Another problem Kerth acknowledged is people drinking on the streets, detailed in this article.

Despite the acknowledged problems with the event, Kerth said Second Saturday is fundamentally different from the Thursday Night Markets in size.

While Thursday Night Markets were confined to an approximately four-block stretch on K Street, Second Saturday ranges all over from Old Sacramento to Alhambra Boulevard and from Broadway to F Street, according to Kerth.

Kerth said the efforts the MBA is making – from educating people about parking to encouraging teens to go home at the 10 p.m. curfew and working to stop the illegal “tailgating” – will not “make a fundamental change, but they’ll head things in the right direction.”

Kerth, Ault and Picker all agreed that there are lessons to be learned from other events, whether they be Thursday Night Markets, Jazz Jubilees, Pacific Rim Festivals or larger events in other cities.

“There’s a lot of community and political will to keep this going forward,” Ault said. “We need to preserve it because it’s a very special entity.”

Picker said that, thinking regionally, downtown and Midtown Sacramento are the “main street” for the area.

“There is a need for people to get together within the Sacramento Valley and be creative and not be constrained by strip malls,” he said. “You’ve got to plan for success, though. Maybe every couple of years you need to shake it up and do something different.”

Kerth said that Second Saturday is far from being just a memory.

“I get asked a lot from folks, ‘Is this the end?’ and my answer has been, ‘Well, I’m still coming down to have fun, are you?’ ” he said. “Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated.”

Brandon Darnell is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.