For the month of July, it’s a quartet of new experiences, all of them undertaken in the hometown for low dough. Check back every Wednesday for a new edition.
On Friday evening, heading home from a rather long evening out, a sign on South Broadway jumped into my consciousness. “Garlic Fest,” it read, located just alongside Broadway in St. Louis Square Park. It’s a funky little space, indeed. Used for a variety of fairs and festivals over the course of the year—usually, it seems, involving classic cars or motorcycles. St. Louis Square Park’s got a playground, a larger-than-most corner grocery, a retired cannon, a historic stone home, and a daily calvacade of the Patch’s most “colorful” residents. And plenty of them were on-hand for Garlic Fest.
The park had some food vendors, like the My Big Fat Greek Truck, along with the neighborhood’s own Iron Barley and Cherokee’s I Scream Cakes. A few vendors of this ’n’ that were huddled under their tents as the afternoon sun bore down. On the western edge of the park, one gent seemed to simply set out a garage sale of sorts, with everything from coats to crock pots set out for possible sale. Unfortunately for him, idling on a large piece of cardboard, business seemed slow.
A few months back, this space highlighted Collinsville’s Horseradish Festival, a memory that came back to me at the Garlic Fest. The reason? Well, when I went home from the Horseradish experience, I told my neighbor; as luck would have it, he was traveling a little deeper into Illinois that very afternoon, and he decided to stop by Woodland Park for the Fest. He wasn’t in love with the event. The specific complaint: not enough horseradish. And so I definitely didn’t run home and tell him about the Garlic Fest, because it was a little bit light on garlic, all things considered.
Not that there weren’t some attempts. At one point, the day’s emcee announced that a garlic sack race was going to be held for the kids. But that didn’t exactly seem to come off; instead, the kids fought with balloon swords or wore out the swingset’s four swings. And the food, of course, was generally using the good bulb, with my portabella sandwich from the Barley definitely generous on the garlic usage.
The most amazing moment, it should be said, came when a young, shoeless teen wearing a comical, garlic-shaped mascot outfit danced down a walkway, accompanying Head East’s KSHE classic, “Never Been Any Reason.” At that moment, I looked around the park at the shirtless fellows and the mismatched families and the teenagers piling into one of the playground set-ups and it hit me, about as clearly as an epiphany could: Even though this staycation visit took place in my old stomping grounds, South St. Louis, this exact scene, with minor variances, could’ve played out in 1982. (Except for the four hipsters out on an ethnographic/photographic field trip.)
The look and feel of the event, the classic rock pumping out of the PA, the look and feel of the audience, too... this staycation took place, in geographical terms, quite near to home. But there was time traveling involved, too And, really, for the $13 sandwich-and-Schlafly combo investment, that’s about all you can ask for in an experience.
Garlic Fest. Wow.
Thought I’d go by for a lark. Found, instead, the essence of a certain slice of the South Side. This one’s a must for 2013.
Note: This story was updated on July 27. First Third Bank is acutally Fifth Third Bank; its logo was included on the banner, but was not an official sponsor. Cherokee's I Scream Cakes was referred to as Eye Scream Cakes. We sincerely regret the errors.
