OSWEGO – The Harborfest Committee organized its second annual Carnival Eats Harborfest this past weekend, providing the community with the summer food and fun that typically comes along with Harborfest, which was officially canceled earlier this month.
The Carnival Eats participating food trucks, located at 1 Lake St., opened up this past weekend offering “carnival favorites” like fried Oreos, corn dogs, funnel cakes and more. While Harborfest is not able to go on this summer, the Harborfest committee wanted to bring the summer feel to the town.
“They asked the carnival who normally has the carnival during Harborfest if they’d bring the food trucks down and open so at least some people could get a taste of Harborfest last year and now again this year,” Oswego Mayor Billy Barlow said. “Some of the proceeds made go back to the Harborfest organization.”
Despite the smaller scale event, the community rushed to support the “pop-up drive-in” carnival, as the Facebook page described the event. The page, which was created last July, has over 850 likes and was a big hit in 2020. The popularity comes from the semblance of normalcy, an opportunity to celebrate the calendar turning to the summer months, according to Barlow.
“People are eager and excited to get out back to festivals and events again,” Barlow said. “I wouldn’t say this weekend was an event but some sort of resemblance of a festival or at least a summer feel.”
Oswego’s annual Harborfest was canceled for the second year in a row due to the pandemic. While COVID-19 has simmered down recently with the vaccination rate and warmer months approaching, the event’s decision makers did not feel the risk was worth it, Barlow said.
“It was a decision that the Harborfest organization made in consultation with the City of Oswego and the state Department of Health, and I’m sure a lot of their sponsors,” Barlow said. “I’m sure nobody wants to take any chances, certainly no sponsor wants to put their name on an event that could spread COVID-19 and of course Harborfest and the city don’t want to be put in that [situation].”
That situation includes 80,000 people flocking to Oswego and an inability to enforce social distancing in an entire city. Beyond that, Harborfest is an event that takes all year to prepare for and the organization would not be able to put on a good enough festival even if it received the mass gathering exemption earlier this month, according to Barlow.
“The logistics and planning of the festival with that mass gathering permit still in question, and it already being May … even if we were given the permit today, Harborfest is an event that takes all year long to plan from lining up musical acts to other sources of entertainment to laying out the parks … and all the planning that goes around that,” Barlow said. “It is not an event that you decide to have on May 1 and pull it off in July.”
The City of Oswego will have another form of summer entertainment, however, replacing its Fourth of July Parade with a block party. The party is expected to be on a much smaller scale than Harborfest, with an estimated attendance of “a few hundred people” as Barlow said, but it will still give downtown businesses the opportunity to increase sales via a larger sidewalk presence and increase of community members. COVID-19 has limited marching bands and organizations from meeting in-person, which was a factor in the parade’s cancelation.
“I actually personally would be comfortable having a parade outside, it lines [Route] 104, which is already spacious,” Barlow said. “That was again more of logistics. We reached out to some marching bands, but marching bands that typically participate in the parade haven’t been practicing, they haven’t been marching, they haven’t been meeting to even feel comfortable participating in the parade. Same with people who would assemble floats or people who would participate in the parade.”
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