International festival numbers down from 2003

Sedosi Alhambra calls attention to the Chronicle's postmortem of the Houston International Festival, held downtown again this year after a disastrous experience in the parking lots at the Reliant complex. As Alhambra points out, reporter Paige Hewitt basically wrote that it was really swell downtown!

She did provide an attendance figure (while misspelling the festival chairman's name):

Nearly perfect weather all four days and moving iFest back downtown drew an "enthusiastic" crowd of at least 200,000 people, including volunteers, sponsors and children 10 and under, whose admission was free, said Robert Sakowtiz, chairman of the festival.

Unfortunately, Hewitt offered no attendance figures for earlier festivals.

Interestingly, the now-defunct News24 site put 2003 festival attendance (the year before the disastrous move from downtown) at 430,000.

This year's festival visitors may well have been enthusiastic, as Hewitt portrays them, but the attendance appears to be down considerably from the last international festival held downtown.

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 05/02/05 10:55 PM | Print |