Westheimer Street Festival - Origin and Early History

Origin and Early History

What became the Westheimer Street Festival was an offshoot of the Westheimer Colony Art Festival (known as the Bayou City Art Festival since 1997), which was established in 1971 as an arts/crafts festival. Both the original event and the later street fair occurred twice yearly over the course of a weekend in mid-April and a weekend in mid-October. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the 'Westheimer Art Festival' and the 'Westheimer Street Festival' continued to diverge. At one point, the art festival became a fenced-off, paid-admission event held in the parking lot of a strip center at the intersection of Westheimer Road and Montrose Boulevard. By this time, the Street Festival extended a dozen blocks along Westheimer and included well over a hundred art and craft vendors, food vendors and beer booths, as well as several outdoor stages showcasing local bands and musicians. Eventually, the Westheimer Colony Association decided to vacate the Neartown area altogether, first moving to downtown Houston and later Memorial Park—reorganizing in the process as the Bayou City Art Festival.

By the early 1990s, the Westheimer Street Festival had grown to an event that hosted as many as 300,000 attendees over a two day period, requiring street closure on Westheimer for about half a dozen blocks and resulting in traffic jams for several blocks further in both directions. The festival had originally been a fairly anachistic and organic event, with no central organization. Realizing that an event of this size required professional management, the City of Houston took steps to ensure that there would be no Westheimer Street Festival in the absence of professional management. The principal step was an agreement with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission to prevent the issuance of so-called 'picnic permits' within the blocks covered by the festival. The TABC agreed that they would only issue a single alcohol permit to the individual or entity holding a street closure permit from the city. The city then restricted the conditions for obtaining the permit: it would not be issued unless the applicant had taken out an insurance policy covering the event and hired sufficient clean-up, sanitation, and security to guarantee minimal impact on surrounding residences. Under these circumstances, the Westheimer Street Festival came under the control of The Westheimer Street Festival Corporation, as led by John Florez.