An aerial view of Evanston Photo: Pi.1415926535 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Evanston began the week in a tournament bracket. Outside magazine’s fifth annual Best Town Ever contest, a March Madness-style reader poll of 64 U.S. towns, opened Monday, May 4, 2015, with Evanston seeded seventh in the Midwest region and matched against No. 10 Eau Claire, Wis.
How the contest works
Voting in each round runs five days, and readers may vote once per round in each matchup. The first round was set to close Friday, May 8. Winners advance until two towns remain on May 29, and the champion is the town with the most votes on June 5. The winner of the Evanston game would meet either Milwaukee or Rapid City, S.D., in the round of 32.
Outside said it picked towns with good access to trails and public land, strong restaurants and neighborhoods, and a good beer scene, while leaving out recent winners and runners-up to make room for underdogs. For the first time the magazine added a wild-card round in which its Instagram followers nominated towns. Port Angeles, Wash., New York, Saugatuck, Mich., and Roanoke, Va., took those four final bracket spots.
The stakes were mostly bragging rights and magazine space. According to the Daily Northwestern, an advancing town would earn a “36 hours” feature in Outside, and the overall winner would appear on the cover of the September issue.
An outdoors case for a college suburb
Evanston’s spot on the ballot followed another recognition. The World Wildlife Fund had just named the city its 2015 U.S. Earth Hour Capital, an honor the newspaper tied to the city’s work on sustainability and renewable energy.
The bracket framed Evanston differently from the restaurant and housing lists it usually turns up on. The Daily Northwestern quoted Mark Muenzer, the city’s community development director, saying the city has been on many lists focused on restaurants or housing and that this nomination highlights a great natural setting as well. The Lake Michigan shoreline is the obvious asset for a town competing on outdoor access.
The newspaper also quoted Stephanie Weiss, a marketing coordinator at the Chicago outdoor retailer Uncle Dan’s, who pointed to how much people in the community love the outdoors.
Sources: Daily Northwestern, May 5, 2015; Outside magazine contest rules.
Margaret Whitfield is the editor of The Evanston Edge and covers local government, development and neighborhoods.
