Sullivan Goss Gallery has been part of Santa Barbara’s downtown community for more than 30 years, making it one of the older retail businesses. We regularly collect address information from our customers so that we can deliver, install or ship paintings to collectors when an exhibition ends. We do business with people from all over the country. But most of our sales — nearly 50 percent over the past two decades — are to people in one zip code: 93108, aka Montecito.
In recent years, my colleagues and I have noticed that we have been making fewer and fewer deliveries to our neighbors just down the 101. So while visitors were scarce during July’s extended heatwave, I decided to dive into our institutional database to see if I could get a measure of what was going on. The results were surprising, and suggest that the heated discussion we have been having about cars on State Street might be missing the point entirely.
After many years of slight fluctuation, our business with Montecitans more than doubled in 2020, when people were unable to easily travel, see movies, attend performances or dine out. As a result, people focused their spending on sprucing up their isolation chambers. They remodeled. They built additions. When the new construction was finished, there were bare walls that needed new art. And for the next three years, people came downtown to appreciate art at Sullivan Goss in record numbers…