New York City: A New Vision for Street Fairs

New York City's Center for an Urban Future, one of the city's great think tanks focused on local-community livability and viability, has published a vision paper on how to improve street fairs.

A Vision for Street Fairs
Artists, architects, urbanists, and developers opine on the future of the city's street fairs in this new report from the Center for an Urban Future. The report examines how the city could turn the city's staple, but "repetitive," street fair into an urban essential.

From the cover:

New York’s street fairs need a makeover. They are bland, repetitive and don’t reflect what’s unique about New York. In order to kick off a discussion about how these staples of summer could better serve New Yorkers, the Center for an Urban Future asked two dozen innovators from a variety of fields for their visions for improving the city’s street fairs.

Interestingly enough, last fall Anwar Saleem, director of H Street Main Street, and I had a conversation about this issue with Steve Moore, who is the director of the Washington DC Economic Partnership. Steve made the point that street festivals--including the H Street Festival, Adams-Morgan Day, Mt. Pleasant Day, Capital Pride, etc.--are major economic drivers, bringing a lot of people into the city, and collectively have a significant economic impact that is underappreciated.

Both Anwar and I recounted how difficult it is to get all the necessary permits, that some requirements are unreasonable and onerous (e.g., you are supposed to get 90% approval of representatives of all properties within 500 feet of the street you are asking to close--that's almost two blocks in every direction!), and that the various fees from the city agencies are incredibly expensive (although you can get some "in-kind" support from the agencies from the Mayor's Office, but the process isn't defined--you need to know or be helped or connected in order to be positioned to be able to get that assistance).

Anyway, I am intrigued by this report.

Note also that the Celebrate Fairfax organization sponsors a training/events conference each year on how to run major events and street festivals. We need to offer such a training program in DC.