Hamilton's Impact on Downtown

Hamilton the Musical, the hit Broadway show, took El Paso by storm this summer. The cast performed to adoring crowds from July 5th to 16th in the historic Plaza Theatre in downtown El Paso. Beyond the dance numbers, catchy songs, and standing ovations, we wanted to examine the broader impact of the series of shows on the downtown area. We looked at the number of visitors to the downtown area for the twelve days before and after Hamilton's run of shows and compared them to the number of visitors from July 5th to 16th. In the map below, you can see the areas that saw the most and least impact.

Most of the area of downtown that we analyzed saw an increase in the number of visitors during the time Hamilton was in town. Surprisingly however, the largest increase in visitors was not concentrated around the Plaza Theatre but rather in the Union Plaza area. For most of the area adjacent to the Union Plaza Transit Terminal, the number of visitors increased by between 100% and 3,000%!

Data on visitors to the downtown area is provided by Near, a private mobility data company that aggregates and anonymizes mobile app data. We imported this data for the dates from June 26th (twelve days before the first Hamilton show) to July 27th (twelve days after the last Hamilton show) and for the specific section of downtown El Paso you see in the map. Then we divided up the geographic area into hexagons of 300 square meters, and we counted the number of visitors to each hexagon before, during, and after the Hamilton dates. Using the average of the twelve days before Hamilton and the twelve days after as a baseline, we compared the number of visitors during the Hamilton dates to the baseline for each hexagon and found the percent difference.

 Check out the data for yourself .