City Residents Battle ‘Cookie Cutter' Street Fairs
By GARY SHAPIRO,
Downtown residents, weary of "cookie cutter" street fairs, appear to be fighting back.
Citing a proliferation of fairs managed by professional promoters, Community Board 2 in Manhattan passed a resolution making those seeking to put on street fairs subject to public hearings.
According to the mayor's office, the community board, which covers Greenwich Village, Little Italy, SoHo, NoHo, and Hudson Square, hosts the highest number of street fairs of any community board in the city. Last year, 52 of the city's 357 street fairs were held in the neighborhoods.
The board is also creating a subcommittee to oversee the permit application process. This marks a change from the past procedure, whereby the district manager of the board would simply work out the schedule with individual street fair applicants.
Some neighborhood activists want more local and unique street fairs, at which their neighbors are behind booths selling items.
The Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit organization, reported in August that a relatively small number of vendors hold a substantial share of permits to selling food and merchandise at street fairs. It reported this as a cause of why many street fairs are "uniformly bland." It found that of the 20 vendors who had most permits to sell food at fairs in 2005, nine were from outside the city.
The three vendor companies (Mort & Ray Productions, Mardi Gras Festival Productions, Clearview Festival Productions) that, according to the report, organized more than 200 of the local fairs did not respond to calls for comment by press time.
Some of the street fairs are staffed by local community groups and have locals behind the booths. One such group is the Perry Street Block Association, whose treasurer, Gerald Banu, described its street fair in early May as one "block-long garage sale." He said profits from the fair pay for free spring flowers and fall bulbs.
A spokesman for the Manhattan president's office said staffers were analyzing where in the borough streets fairs were taking place most often. The Mayor's Community Assistance Unit oversees the permitting process for street fairs in New York City.
