Mayfest: gone but not forgotten.
The United Arts Council, spending its energy this year on internal organization, pulled the plug on Salisbury’s traditional highlight of spring and harbinger of summer. There will be no Mayfest this year, even though this was supposed to be its 25th anniversary.
“We had to focus this year on getting the board and whole council working in the correct direction,” said United Arts Council president Ken Weaver. “With Mayfest, we decided it would be best to back up and regroup and decide what Mayfest should be.”
The board’s move to can Mayfest 2001 actually came last fall. Weaver said it was a tough decision but, as the new president, the more he learned about the council, the more he felt it had to focus on its mission before Mayfest.
Plus, any future Mayfests will require more community involvement and partnerships — not a festival run solely by the arts council staff, Weaver said.
The event has dwindled since outgrowing and leaving its successful City Park setting several years ago. Relocations to the Rowan Fairgrounds and a couple of places downtown failed to capture the same kind of enthusiasm. The Arts Council even tried changing the name and, one year, had the event in June, not May.
Last year’s one-day, downtown event was a disappointment, and the arts council decided it must reconsider the whole Mayfest concept, originally established as a way to showcase the local arts.
“We should be bringing 30,000 to 40,000 people, not 2,000,” Weaver says. “We don’t want to have it if we can’t have it right.”
Weaver said United Arts Council plans to have a committee meeting in late May or early June to begin talking about a possible Mayfest 2002.
It has been a year of transition for the organization. After five years as executive director, Linda Kesler resigned last June.
Sylvia Wiseman, a former executive director who was in on the ground floor of the organization and Mayfest, filled in as interim director until United Arts Council hired Collyn Evans as its new executive director in November.
Wiseman, as well as other longtime arts council supporters and volunteers, wanted Mayfest to happen this year, especially because it was going to be the 25th anniversary.
As interim director, Wiseman appointed a committee, made many of the early contacts with city officials and police and persuaded Shari Keller to be chairman.
“While I was there, I was determined to push it through,” Wiseman says, noting that Keller already had chosen a downtown location. “It’s something I truly thought had to be done.”
Keller had been involved with the event almost since its first year, when Mayfest essentially was a flat-bed truck in the First Union parking lot. She has worked with or been a craftsman, food vendor and entertainer at past Mayfests and may be “the longest running volunteer they ever had,” she says.
“I was very disappointed from the fact that it was as old as it was, and it was going to be laid to rest,” Keller says.
Over the years, as Mayfest grew into a weekend festival that spread across City Park, it became a victim of its own success. The event became a security concern, and the crowds were hard to manage within a residential neighborhood where parking was limited.
Mayfest left the park in 1996.
But Keller believes the relaxed, park setting is what made Mayfest unique. Families came for the whole day, finding plenty of places to spread a blanket and find shade. Its popularity attracted craftsmen and visitors from other states, and local citizens thought of Mayfest as the sign that spring truly had arrived and summer was just around the corner.
“I hate that it left City Park,” Keller says. “It was bittersweet in having to leave because Mayfest truly was a park festival. Trying to reconstruct it (elsewhere) was hard. Things just did not move forward.
“Mayfest was not a downtown festival, but I’m not saying it couldn’t be a downtown festival.”
A major irony for the United Arts Council is that it also founded Autumn Jubilee, a fall arts festival at Dan Nicholas Park that continues to thrive and has become a tremendous county success.
Keller understands the council’s wanting to step back and evaluate a declining Mayfest. While she was disappointed that Mayfest was canceled, she says if there was no support for it, she didn’t want plans to move forward and “see it fail again.”
Weaver stresses that he would like any citizen interested in Mayfest to participate in the committee discussions coming up later this spring.
Keller, for one, says organizers should consider re-establishing Mayfest in a park setting — the new Salisbury Community Park on Hurley School Road. “There could be so many things incorporated into that area,” she says.
Others believe the return of Easy Street and F&M Bank’s major renovations in the 200 block of North Main Street will provide the needed downtown backdrop for a permanent, workable Mayfest site.
“Mayfest has stumbled around because it can’t find a home,” Weaver says.
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