Festivalé

Awesome is better in bunches.

by Brian Howard

This is how my friend Gab describes the first spring-like day of the year: It's like people have been released from their homes, and five long months of pent-up energy spills out into the streets.

It's the first day it's OK to walk outside in a jacket rather than a coat. The day it doesn't feel absurd to wear sunglasses. The day you can finally open your windows. This year it happened in March. But this past weekend, following a miserable stretch of rain and overcast skies, felt a bit like released-from-homes day, part deux. There was a similar energy in the air. The sun shone. The thermometer crept up. There were more festivals per square mile in Philadelphia over the weekend than at seemingly any other point in the calendar year. Your humble reporter was not immune to the sunshine, taking in three festivals and a rock show over the two days.

First up was the Trenton Avenue Arts Festival and corresponding Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby on Saturday morning. I'm no stranger to Kenzo. I've biked through it in the early morning as part of a route my cycling buddy Justin likes to call the Tour de Kensington. Which is not to say that I'm a local or even that I get there very often, but I thought I had a feel for the place. Bustling, troubled neighborhood fighting the good fight. But the Kensington on display during the TAAF/KKSD astounded me. It was like some gorgeous, gritty bike utopia with trains of cyclists taking over Frankford Avenue and locked by the score to fences and posts, their riders, slightly sweaty from the exertion, meandering about.

Then there was the Kinetic Sculpture Derby, a rolling paean to ramshackle ingenuity — perhaps Kensington's unofficial motto — as contraptions made of hundreds of repurposed bikes navigated the streets. There was the anti-casino flotilla, the Neighborhood Bike Works Ghostbusters brigade, the pedal-powered Kenzinger truck, the zombie Amish jalopy and more.

The feeling of energy, of movement, was palpable. I do love my East Passyunk digs, but I left Kenzo feeling winsome and a little bit neighborhood-jealous.

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Next up was the opening of the Piazza at Schmidts, possibly the exact opposite of Trenton Avenue. The yawning, sculpted Northern Liberties space is certainly something to behold, an exquisitely engineered counterpoint to the see-what-sticks ethos in Kensington. With its scalloped brick, the Phillies on the big screen (a wink to the old Liberty Yards movement to build the Phillies stadium here?), polished retail spaces, sleek overhead lighting, sharp lines and the CP-run Biggest Trunk Show in Philadelphia in its midst, Bart Blatstein's thumbprint on Northern Liberties is now indelible. The Piazza and its connecting Liberties Walk stand as a testament to diligence (as one friend commented, Blatstein's vision has improved).

And then there was the Italian Market Festival, a two-day food-and-facepaint affair in South Philly. The venerable testament to music, mangia! and mayhem felt a bit thinner, splintered this year, perhaps due to the absence of longtime sponsor Sorrento. Having never before caught the Sunday morning invocation, it was more than a little enlightening watching the procession of saint statues — and passers-by pinning dollar bills to their sashes — up Ninth, down Christian toward St. Paul's church. The whole thing — the sausage, the red sauce, the gnocchi, the Sizzlin' Sicilian T-shirts — was heartening in a different way, an old-school community banding together in the absence of its corporate benefactor.

It all made me wonder if happy accidents like the convergence of festivals like this should be left entirely to chance. Why not proclaim the week before Memorial Day (after which the city starts vacating for shore points) something like Festivalé: Everyone has a cultural/street festival! Because even though, as the Molly Eichel-curated Ultimate Summer Fun Guide proves, there's something awesome to do every day this summer, awesome is better in bunches.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)