Downtown Topeka is getting livelier, residents say

Downtown Topeka has gotten much livelier since Julian Jenkins and Marcelino Gomez III moved there last June, they say.

A year ago, Gomez said, he’d be greeted by silence and a general lack of activity whenever he went out front after 5 p.m at their second-story apartment in the 700 block of S. Kansas Avenue.

“But now we go outside and there’s people hanging out, kids hanging out,” he said. “There’s people walking up and down ‘the av.’ We call it ‘the av.’”