Battery Park’s usual cadre of sidewalk performers faced stiff competition for attention this weekend as the CultureFest arts celebration brought clowns, paintings, and political cabaret to the neighborhood.Produced by NYC & Company, CultureFest is a yearly event that aims to increase local and tourist traffic to New York’s cultural institutions. This year’s festival featured two performance stages and representatives from 114 local cultural organizations, ranging from Carnegie Hall to the Metropolitan Museum to the Central Park Zoo.

“We’re doing this to drive awareness of the city’s cultural organizations,” the president of NYC & Company, Christayne Nicholas, said. “We want to celebrate the amazing arts and culture organizations we have here.”

The company began work on the inaugural CultureFest in 2000, with an eye to boosting an already-thriving tourism industry.By the late summer of 2001, everything was in place for a splashy September 25th opening in Bryant Park. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the event’s focus. “After 9/11, we knew tourism would go down,” Ms. Nicholas said. “We wanted to reach out to New Yorkers to help sustain these organizations.” Ms. Nicholas estimates that CultureFest 2001 drew about 65 organizations and 40,000 visitors, despite occurring so soon after the attacks.

In 2003, the festival moved down to historic Battery Park and picked up Merrill Lynch as its major sponsor. “This is a fit that makes sense for us,” the president of the Merrill Lynch Foundation, Eddy Bayardelle, said of CultureFest. “We’re down here, and after 9/11 not a lot of people were coming down here. Downtown still needs a lot of visibility and support.”

Cultural tourism is again “on the rise,” according to Ms. Nicholas, and CultureFest has been helping the cause. An exit survey at the 2005 festival revealed that 75% of visitors were exposed to a cultural organization they had never heard of before that they planned to visit during the next year.

Despite the construction around Battery City Park, Ms. Nicholas estimated that a record 80,000 people would attend the 2006 event. Despite the barriers that surround the rebuilding work, the park was filled with long rows of white tents, each housing the small display of a different organization. Most groups geared their setups toward the festival’s youngest attendees. The Museum of Modern Art’s tent included a table with watercolor paints and prints from its new Brice Marden exhibit, along with a volunteer who guided children in their production of their very own contemporary art. Across the park, volunteers from the Big Apple Circus distributed red foam clown noses to anyone shameless enough to wear them.

At the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s booth, Lupe Montesinos looked on as his 7-year-old daughter, Isabel, ground corn into powder with a stone mortar and pestle. “We came here because we saw an ad in the newspaper,” Mr. Monesinos said, encouraging Isabel to smell the exotic plants in the display before her. “I haven’t done this before,” she said, rubbing the leaves with a shy smile.