Revitalized El Paso ready to show off for papal tourists
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — No longer the desolate space it was a few years ago, downtown El Paso is ripe with new hotels, bars, restaurants — and bulldozers that herald the planned construction of a streetcar, a children's museum, a Mexican-American cultural center and new mixed-used buildings.
The far West Texas city is ready to shed its long-held reputation as a center of illegal immigration and show off its revitalized streets to the tens of thousands of tourists hoping to get a glimpse of Pope Francis, who will cap a five-day visit to Mexico on Feb. 17 in neighboring Ciudad Juárez with a Mass in a large field near the border that many will be able to see from downtown.
El Paso's renewed energy stems from many young people who left the economically challenged city in search of better opportunities but returned to make a difference.
"Ten years ago, I remember friends telling me this was 'Hell Paso' and they wanted to move away," said Rep. Claudia Ordaz, who at 30 years old is the youngest member of the City Council and lived in Washington, D.C., and Austin before coming home and running for office.
[...] the Border Patrol shifted its policies in the 1990s, and within months, the number of illegal crossings in El Paso dipped from 10,000 daily to 500.
[...] the notion that El Paso and its downtown in particular were unsafe grew as extreme violence in Juárez — at one point considered a homicide capital with multiple daily murders — took shape around 2006.
Several downtown neighborhoods, city government and a portion of the border highway will be closed for what the City Council called an "unparalleled high-profile event."