Plan for Wilshire Festival Clears Major City Hurdle

An ambitious plan to use a seven-block stretch of Wilshire Boulevard as the setting for a multicultural successor to the popular, but violence-plagued Street Scene Festival cleared a major legislative hurdle Tuesday.

Meeting in a joint session, two City Council committees gave preliminary approval to the Wilshire Festival proposal after hearing from enthusiastic community representatives and chief organizer Rich Perelman, who repeatedly assured the council members that the event would cost the city no money to stage.

The joint committee’s vote overrode staff opposition to reviving the idea of a citywide festival, particularly on Wilshire. The staff contended that it would disrupt traffic and disturb surrounding neighborhoods.

Perelman told reporters that while the committees merely authorized the start of contract negotiations, their action will make it possible to start lining up corporate sponsors for the $2-million event. He said the festival is tentatively scheduled for the weekend of Sept. 16 and 17, 1989.

The Downtown Street Scene Festival, sponsored by the city between 1978 and 1986, attracted hundreds of thousands of people annually and featured food booths, arts and crafts, live entertainment and carnival rides.

Violence during the 1986 festival and a financial scandal involving Sylvia Cunliffe, former head of the city’s General Services Department, prompted officials to cancel the 1987 event. One person was fatally shot at the 1986 festival, at least 40 others were injured and 35 were arrested.

Following the problems, city officials decided they would try to find a private group to stage a street festival at no cost to the city, along the lines of the 1984 Olympics and the Los Angeles Marathon.

Perelman, who worked on the Olympics, repeatedly assured the council’s Recreation and Finance committees that the city would be lending its name to the festival but otherwise would not be asked to spend a cent to help stage it. Any use of police for traffic control or other purposes would be paid for up front, Perelman said.

Variety of Music

Under Perelman’s plan, the Wilshire Festival would be held in a fenced-off area running along Wilshire between Normandie and Western avenues. As envisioned, the festival would feature a main stage, as well as five to six smaller stages, with a variety of music highlighted by 10 headliners to attract up to 150,000 spectators each of the two days. In all, about 100 local acts would be lined up, Perelman said.

Other festival features would include a petting zoo, rides, a variety of arts and crafts outlets and numerous staging areas where corporate sponsors would show off their products, Perelman added.

Perelman said the festival needed commercial backing. Unlike the city-backed Street Scene events, which were free to the public, Perelman said organizers would need to charge a small admission fee, ranging up to $3 for adults and $1 for children. In a prospectus, Perelman said the admission would not only help the sponsors break even, but also would “keep panhandlers and other undesirables away from what is designed as a festival for the family.”

To head off the type of violence that marred the 1986 Street Scene, Perelman said spectators would not be allowed to bring food or beverages into the festival, and sales of beer or wine coolers would be limited to daylight hours. Entertainment would not include heavy metal or punk rock acts, which police said provoked some of the 1986 problems.

Reviewed Plan

Officials who reviewed Perelman’s proposal said the siting along Wilshire, one of the busiest surface streets in Los Angeles, would disrupt bus lines and parking by spectators would spill over into the nearby residential neighborhoods. But Councilman Joel Wachs said that if the festival is worth holding, people will tolerate such inconveniences for the two days.

Perelman said that buses can easily be rerouted, and he has located at least 19,000 parking spaces in nearby office buildings that will be available for the weekend event.

Wachs and other council members also said they hoped that some day, such festivals could be staged in other parts of the city. Perelman responded that if corporate sponsors consider the Wilshire event a success, he intends to promote other festivals elsewhere.