The weather cooperated and that brought big crowds out to this past weekend’s Park Avenue Summer Art Festival in Rochester.
It was just over a mile of art, crafts food and music, and you had to walk relatively slowly to enjoy it, mainly because at times, it was just too crowded to walk any faster.
Among the vendors set up along the popular Rochester avenue, Aaron Costa, owner of the Krudco skateboard shop. He just moved his shop to Park Ave recently so he felt it was vital they have a booth at the festival.
“It’s been awesome. Letting people know that we’re here because this is our first week here and we moved out of the space that we’ve been in for 19 years.”
Another vendor, Dave Beadling, was selling nature photography. He says Rochester is just a good festival town.
“People come from all over the country really, to attend some of these festivals, this as well as Corn Hill. We do 16 or 17 festivals a year, and most of them are pretty close to Rochester”
Festival producer Jeff Springut says every year they try to tweak the event just a bit, this year they added a Kids Park near the Rochester Museum and Science Center and they also added to the list of more than 350 artists participating.
“There’s over 50 new artists at the festival this year so collectively, that’s a large percentage, and people have been a lot of comments about the quality, diversity, not only in terms of media, but price points, so a little something for everybody here.”
Springut estimates total attendance over the weekend was somewhere between 215,000 and 225,000.