Festival replacement remains unknown

By gedward on August 8, 2006 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As expected, the city of Riverside officially severed ties last week with the association charged with running the annual Orange Blossom Festival, thus ending the event after 12 years. Likewise, officials are now saying there indeed will not be a replacement event in 2007, leaving open the question of whether there ever will be an actual replacement.

2004 - Orange Blossom Festival

Sadly, cutting the ties with the OBF Association also means losing Riverside Wednesday Night, a crafts/farmers fair held each week on the downtown pedestrian mall from March through November. Though many residents were aware of the possible loss of the much-larger, yearly Orange Blosson Festival, many may be surprised to learn the weekly event is also now gone:

Riverside resident Josephine Jackson, who was strolling the mall Wednesday night with her husband, said she would miss the community atmosphere Riverside Wednesday Night promoted.

"It was just a nice outing," she said

...

Cary Knight, owner of the Upper Crust sandwich shop on Main Street, said Riverside Wednesday Night was a boon to businesses.

"We needed something to bring people out of their houses to see this beautiful downtown," he said, adding that he hopes the city will find something else to achieve the same goal.

The Press-Enterprise

Although we agreed the OBF had strayed a bit in recent years, we disagreed with the knee-jerk, outright cancellation of it barely 48-hours following this year's event. Thus, our hope is that city officials keep their word on plans for establishing replacements for both the weekly and annual events. Moreover, with the quickly-growing arts presence downtown, talk of an annual "arts and culture" festival as a replacement for OBF sounds very promising. However, if city officials wait too long, they may find re-establishing the larger annual event could be much more difficult than fixing the one they had.

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