Taste of St. Louis. Photograph by ProPhotoSTL
Over the past two years, St. Louis’ festival landscape has come to resemble a game of musical chairs. For a host of complex reasons, event organizers are trying new locations, leaving the downtown area without some of its signature events.
To understand what’s happened, one needs to go back about 18 months, to a series of meetings at City Hall. The city had been courting an L.A. talent agency, ICM Partners, hoping to lock in two supersized festivals on the Gateway Mall during Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, produced under the name Summer Rocks. One would be focused on country music; the other would have a rock vibe. The legislation, incorporating a contract with the innocuous-sounding title of “Festival Reservation Agreement,” hinged on giving ICM exclusive rights to stage summer music festivals in the city for a 10-year period, with few exceptions. The noncompete clause was intended to protect ICM’s investment and prevent other commercial festival producers from expanding into the city, but the early version was written so favorably to ICM, organizers of homegrown festivals felt unwelcome.
A significant voice in the debate was Jeremy Segel-Moss, a local musician and president of the St. Louis Blues Society, who organized a petition against the bill, arguing that the city was bypassing homegrown talent in an effort to chase “quick money.” Trying to persuade politicians of the value of St. Louis–based talent, Segel-Moss stressed the economic impact of local musicians. He suggested that the best music festivals build year by year and reflect a local sensibility. “We have to be allowed to grow,” he says.
Eventually, the stringent noncompete clause was softened around the edges. The legislation’s final version allowed others to produce single-stage music festivals, as well as festivals not focused on music.
The rest is history. In the wake of the decision, some festivals moved west. Taste of St. Louis and Bluesweek left for Chesterfield; then, earlier this year, Ribfest announced that it would move to St. Charles.
As for ICM’s promised concerts, they’ve never materialized. Downtown was eerily quiet over Memorial Day, especially with the Cardinals on the other side of the state, playing the Royals. At press time, Labor Day appeared destined to be similarly subdued. From city boosters’ perspective, the silver lining is that the contract forces ICM to pay a $25,000 fee each time it fails to present a festival in the slots that the city is holding open.
When city leaders originally explained the vision, they often name-checked Lollapalooza, an itinerant festival that made its permanent home in Chicago’s Grant Park in 2005. More recently, Mayor Francis Slay’s director of communications, Maggie Crane, conceded that the idea of St. Louis’ ever having a music festival of that size is “a lofty goal.” She defends the way in which the city structured the deal, saying that it will be “a huge boon” if the festival happens in 2016 or beyond or “a minimal loss,” meaning that the lack of activity will be offset by the $25,000 payments into city coffers. Crane says that the city does not organize festivals but instead facilitates them, and the legislation signed last spring was simply the green light for ICM to start booking acts.
Although ICM has a track record of managing and booking a roster of well-known artists for live performances, its expertise is not in organizing festivals from the ground up. Exact reasons for ICM’s failure to produce a festival have never been given, and calls to ICM inquiring about the prospects of the festivals materializing in 2016 were not returned.
Homemade Music
Today, LouFest is the only event that might be considered “substantially similar” to the festivals. It’s large-scale, music-focused, ticketed—and exempt from ICM’s noncompete clause, like Fair Saint Louis.
“When I saw the proposal, I knew it wasn’t realistic, so we didn’t sweat it,” says founding promoter Brian Cohen. Protections for LouFest were granted without the organizers’ having to actively lobby because the city understood the music festival’s value: Last year it attracted 36,000 people over two days.
“Scaling up has allowed us more range,” says Cohen, noting that the festival has grown by about 20 percent each year. It’s now about twice the size it was in 2010, when it began. This month, LouFest will have four stages in Forest Park and 34 acts, including Ludacris, the Avett Brothers, and Hozier. Working out which bands to book is “a delicate balance,” he adds. “On the one hand, our fans want us to book national and international bands who don’t play here very often—but they also want us to spotlight local talent and help them reach the next level.” Local groups who’ve performed at LouFest include Pokey LaFarge, Kim Massie, and the Bottle Rockets.
“There’s no single way that festivals operate,” Cohen says. “Every event is different, and every market is different.”
As a counterexample, consider Bluesweek. It began in 2010, the same year as LouFest. For several years, the festival was hosted downtown and free for concertgoers; in 2013, it attracted a crowd of 70,000. Then, when news of Summer Rocks emerged, festival organizers began looking elsewhere for a home. Last year’s festival was held at Chesterfield Amphitheater as a ticketed event; attendance fell to 15,000—less than a quarter that of the previous year. Segel-Moss says it was a successful event in “a gorgeous amphitheater” but also notes that it had a much different atmosphere than a festival on the streets of St. Louis does. “If it is a flagship festival, it should be in the city,” he contends.
Bluesweek was canceled for Memorial Day weekend, and at press time its future was unclear. Organizer Mike Kociela has floated the idea of moving it back to the city and partnering with the National Blues Museum.
Going Westward
Chesterfield’s population (46,000 and still growing) and relatively new lakeside amphitheater (with a capacity of 4,000 people) has led some regional events to put down roots there. Jason Baucom, Chesterfield’s superintendent of arts and entertainment, says that festivals have approached them, not the other way around.
Last year, after being downtown for years, Taste of St. Louis—also organized by Kociela—migrated west in the wake of the Summer Rocks deal. “The move to Chesterfield allowed us to spread the event out and create a less congested atmosphere for patrons,” says K Sonderegger, another of the food fest’s organizers. She estimates that last year’s attendance over three days was between 150,000 and 175,000—“right about what we projected for the new smaller location,” she says. Now in its 11th year, Taste has always considered itself a regional event, but the move to Chesterfield has underscored its regional identity, with organizers recruiting restaurants in St. Charles County as well.
Taste of St. Louis isn’t the only food festival with its sights set on St. Charles. Last year, Ribfest organizer Mike Calvin found himself scrambling to find a new location after the ICM agreement. “We are set up as a street festival,” he says, so moving to a park was not an option. He found a new fit in New Town, an upscale suburban community with a walkable streetscape. In May, the event attracted approximately 100,000 people over three days—“what we were expecting,” says Calvin. He says he’s had conversations with leaders in St. Charles and St. Louis, “both expressing they want us to come back badly.” Although he has not made a firm decision, he says he is leaning toward holding Ribfest in St. Charles next year.
In the meantime, a new barbecue festival, Q in the Lou, will be held in downtown St. Louis from September 25 to 27. The event could help elevate St. Louis’ status as a mecca for barbecue, one that rivals other cities like Memphis and Kansas City.
Park Place
Earlier this year, the Scottish Games and Cultural Festival announced that it, too, would be moving to Chesterfield—though not because of the ICM deal.
“There are so many events in Forest Park and the city now that they basically interfere with each other,” says festival chairman Jim McLaren. This year, the festival will be held on a piece of land adjacent to Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield rather than in Forest Park.
The move was a “mutual decision,” McLaren says, because the festival was getting close to outgrowing the portion of the park that it had been using. McLaren points to parking and congestion as two of the most pressing concerns. “If anyone tells you that parking is not a problem in Forest Park, they are not telling you the truth,” he says. “Parking has always been a hassle” for major events, he says. At times, the event has attracted 5,000 people over two days, and it expects this year to be even bigger while playing host to the Masters World Championship in Scottish athletics. “If the location works out,” says McLaren, “I think we’d be very happy to stay there.”
In the meantime, an even larger event—Fair Saint Louis—has made its home in Forest Park as the Arch grounds undergo renovations. Last year’s Friday-night firework display drew an estimated 100,000 people to Forest Park—and that number could grow. Greg Hayes, director of the city’s parks department, says he’d be comfortable if 250,000 users were in the park at once. “We don’t have a set number of what would be a safe number of people to have in the park,” he says.
Transportation was a major concern, but organizers took the approach of not overthinking it, believing that the area around Forest Park has a sufficiently robust infrastructure in place. Attendees were encouraged to take advantage of nearby MetroLink stations or park at St. Louis Community College, near the park’s southeast edge. “People would figure out a way to get here,” says Fair Saint Louis general chairman Steve Pozaric. “It went as well as we could have hoped.”
Over the long term, Fair Saint Louis will have to make a decision about whether to return to the Arch grounds. “We want to see Fair Saint Louis come back,” says Ryan McClure, a spokesman for City Arch River 2015, the organization set up to coordinate the Arch grounds’ renovation. When the construction work is complete, the Arch grounds will be better able to host “festivals and events of all sizes,” he says. The demolition of the parking garage to the north of the Arch will create a new piece of usable land large enough to permit the construction of additional music stages.
But in light of the weather-dependent construction schedule, it’s unclear whether holding the event there next July is an option, he adds. Beyond that date, neither side has made any commitments. “We are blessed to have two possible locations,” says Pozaric.
In the meantime, Ribfest, the Scottish Games, and Taste of St. Louis appear to have found new suburban homes. Yet the dust won’t settle until there’s a clear-cut decision regarding Summer Rocks. Expect a scramble to claim prime spots on the calendar and on the map that would be freed up when the contract is terminated. The earliest that could happen: next summer.
