How two block parties became KC Irish Fest
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Oh, how the festival has grown. Photo: Courtesy of Erin Gabert
A festival born out of two neighborhood parties that outgrew their parking lots returns Friday to Crown Center as Kansas City Irish Fest, one of the biggest Irish festivals in the country.
Why it matters: Irish immigrants had an early impact on Kansas City, literally carving downtown's first streets out of limestone bluffs, and 90,000 people now gather each Labor Day weekend to celebrate that heritage.
Flashback: In the early 2000s, Brookside and Westport each threw its own Irish festival in a parking lot. Both kept growing, and after Celtic punk band Flogging Molly packed Brookside's lot, organizers realized the neighborhoods couldn't hold them anymore.
- Leaders of both fests met around a founder's kitchen table and made a plan: one big festival for the whole city.
The first year nearly ended it. The new Kansas City Irish Fest debuted at Berkley Riverfront Park in 2003, at the end of a summer-long drought. Friday night was a hit. Saturday morning, the rain came, and it didn't stop.
- The dry ground flooded. A tour bus sank in the mud. Organizers canceled the rest of the weekend.
- "It was a muddy, wild, wet mess down there," Erin Gabert, an organizer since that first year, tells Axios.
The party moved inside. Stranded musicians and fans ended up at the Hotel Phillips downtown, and music broke out in the lobby bar. It didn't stop all weekend.
- "You had bands that normally played in front of thousands of people, and they are just playing in a hotel lobby bar," Gabert says.
- The founders took it as a sign. The Irish community packed a fundraiser at Drexel Hall to keep the fest alive. Crown Center offered to host, and the festival moved there in 2004. It never left.
What they're saying: "The Irish are known to be really resilient people," Gabert says. "It's kind of only appropriate that the Irish Fest has been that way as well."
State of play: Today, the fest stretches from Crown Center Square down Grand Boulevard into Washington Square Park, with more than 300 musicians on seven stages, an Irish marketplace, comedians flown in from Ireland and a Sunday night sing-along.
- It's run almost entirely by 1,000 volunteers, led by executive director Keli O'Neill Wenzel, who's held the job since the festival began.
- About 30 founders are still involved, and they gather in one of the whiskey tents on the first day of the festival each year to raise a glass to how far it's come.
If you go: The fest runs Friday through Sunday at Crown Center, with gates opening at 5pm Friday and tickets available online. With heat in the forecast, organizers will have free hydration stations and misting fans out across the grounds.
The bottom line: The best part of that flooded first weekend became a tradition. After the stages close each night, musicians still gather at the festival hotel and play for whoever's around, just like they did in 2003.