Once Rubber-Stamped, Street Fairs Get Scrutiny

 by Barry Owens

Each spring for the past 20 years, Joe Giovanni has donned a suit and stood before community boards throughout the city in seeking permits for the dozens of street fairs his company puts on in the summer months.

Each year, the president of Mardi Gras Productions says, the sales pitch has grown more difficult.
Last month, before Community Board 1's South Street Seaport and Financial District committees, the tension was palpable.
Street Fair on Water Street, one of more than a dozen held Dowtwn each year. Photo: Courtesy Mardi Gras Productions.

Already burdened with closed streets and facing a decade of construction, some on the committee felt the street fairs were a further burden on the community.

"It seems like everybody wants a piece of our neighborhood and it's horrible," said board member Catherine McVay Hughes.

Others said it was too much to ask of local businesses.

"They come down here and take dollars out of the workers' pockets that could have been spent at local lunch counters," said Joel Kopel, a general manager of William Barthman Jewelers on lower Broadway and a Downtown Alliance board member.

The Alliance has sought to limit street fairs in the district, especially ones that fall on weekdays. While most
street fairs in the city are planned for weekends, those in the Financial District are set for weekdays to capture the workday crowds.

The Alliance claims the fairs not only hurt retailers, but choke traffic and pedestrian flow in the district.

Giovanni said the complaint is not a new one. But it has grown louder since the Alliance has pressed the issue. "The bigger the gorilla gets, the easier it is for it to push you around," Giovanni said.

The Alliance claims Downtown businesses and residents are the ones being pushed around by the street fairs.

Jennifer Hensley, director of intergovernmental affairs for the organizations and a CB1 member, said the Alliance had been "deluged" by business owners' complaints about the fairs. She was the lone vote on the Seaport Committee opposing the fairs. The Financial District Committee approved the fairs in its area, too, but in a contentious 5-4 split.

Hensley said a petition had been circulated among shop owners on Fulton Street asking that the fairs not be allowed there. The Alliance would not make the petition available to the Trib. Bryan Evans, a spokesman for the Alliance, said the petition contained 35 signatures, most of them from shop owners between 50 and 150 Fulton St.

A manager at Lee's House, a T-shirt and souvenir shop at 50 Fulton St., shrugged. He said he hadn't seen the petition.

"Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad," he said of the street fairs.

An informal poll by the Trib yielded a similar response from more than a dozen businesses along Fulton and Broadway.

The two committees recommended approval of 13 street fairs. Two more, in Tribeca, were to be up for a vote of the Tribeca Committee on March 4. The full board will vote on all the fairs at its March 16 meeting.

Nearly half of the fairs are sponsored by Friends of Community Board 1, the nonprofit fund raising arm of the board. The organization expects to raise $12,000 from Downtown fairs this year. Gary Fagin, a leader of the Seaport Community Coalition said the coalition raised $4,000 in funds from a street fair at the Seaport last summer.

Paul Goldstein, CB1's district manager, said that despite complaints, the fairs were likely to continue. "The number of street fairs we have in Lower Manhattan is tiny compared to any other district in New York," he said. "They're an integral part of the city. I don't know that we are going to change that."