Reality of Festival Park

The reality of Festival Park is that you can have only a limited number of festivals, because it's surrounded by homes. That's the downside of putting residential there. You have to worry about the future of Brewfest now that people will be living all around it. Which is too bad because despite little or no promotion Brewfest is probably the most successful Elgin festival.

Festival Park is not like Grant Park or Millenium Park in Chicago, which are surrounded by commercial buildings. You can have a Lollapalooza there every weekend and nobody will wince. But Elgin planners built a "festival" park surrounded by residential homes. These residents will quickly tire of festivals, especially if it involves a lot of traffic and/or music. Ironically, the more successful the festival, the more annoyed the neighbors will be. That's just a prediction. I could be wrong--I often am.

My guess though is that festival park won't actually lead to more or bigger festivals. And that's too bad, because there are a lot of music festivals that would be fun to have in Elgin. ....

• world music festival
• punk music festival
• chicago indie music festival
• unsigned festival (unsigned chicagoland bands)
• chamber music festival
• new music festival (avante garde composers)

How would neighbors feel about music festivals every other weekend or whatever? Yeah...This is why I question the wisdom of building $5M latrines and such which will be in use rarely...