PorchFest organizers share historic roots, unexpected growth

Once upon a time, a group of Springfield neighbors got together — and a music festival was born.

Since 2014, PorchFest has been a free, family-friendly event hosted in Springfield by the people who live there. This year’s PorchFest, hosted by Springfield Preservation and Revitalization, will take place from noon to 8 p.m. Saturday and feature over 30 bands and artists performing on porches throughout the day.

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Michael Haskins, executive director of SPAR, said the event encourages attendees to “bring the whole family,” including dogs, for which they will have rest areas. Seating is limited, and he said he recommends bringing a chair.

There will be shuttles from parking locations and ADA accessible restrooms as well.

PorchFest also is always looking for volunteers as well as porch hosts to allow musicians to play in front of their homes.

Mandie Marron, SPAR community coordinator, said PorchFest raises the money for matching grants to support art in Springfield in addition to reinvesting funds back into the next year’s fest.

“A piece of every year's revenue from PorchFest actually goes into putting public art back into Springfield,” she said. “So that's where the Historic Springfield mural when you enter comes into play, the giraffe statue, the Springfield dog park mosaic.”

Food truck offerings and a variety of craft beer and wine also will be available for purchase.

“One of my hopes is that, on top of showcasing a lot of different performers and artists, we have a vendor market to showcase artisans, in the community, whether they are baking fresh baked goods [or] creating art, whether they're photographers or nonprofits, whether they're just contributing to our community in some positive way,” Marron said.

Based on recent PorchFest turnouts, SPAR expects to see about 25,000 people over the course of the day.

But it wasn’t always such a large event. At one point, its organizers wondered if they would be able to get people from other Jacksonville neighborhoods to come to Springfield at all.

Bringing people to a vibrant, ‘misunderstood’ community

Christina Parrish Stone, one of the original organizers of the music festival who was living in Springfield at the time of its inception in 2014, said the idea came from neighbors chatting on porches and one person who had heard of a porch-based musical event in her hometown in upstate New York.

“At the time, we were having issues with other people in Jacksonville not thinking it was a particularly desirable or safe neighborhood to visit,” Parrish Stone said. “I was involved with SPAR, and we brainstormed this idea and, as a group, we created the event.”

Parrish Stone, who now works as the executive director at St. Johns Cultural Council, said PorchFest not only changed her career trajectory but also had a major and lasting impact on Springfield itself.

On the morning of that first PorchFest, Parrish Stone said she woke up having no idea what would happen or how many people might show up. But thousands came.

“I was walking from porch to porch to hand musicians their checks, and I was walking through a side street to get back to the mainstage with the last performer of the day,” she said, “and I looked down at the porch, and it was an absolute sea of people.”

The sight moved her to tears, she said, because “for a long time, Springfield was the stepchild historic neighborhood.”

“When I moved there from San Marco, people thought I was crazy,” she said. “But it was a wonderful neighborhood that was misunderstood. I always felt safe and an amazing sense of community, and we had to overcome that perception. PorchFest has helped do that.”

By the second year, the event had 10,000 people show up, and it has continued to grow.

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“What I'm really excited about is we have a true mainstage this year,” Marron said “So I am really, really excited to see the whole festival come together at the mainstage at the end of the night with one of our headliners in kind of the heart of the Pearl Street business district.”

Parrish Stone said it is amazing to see the growth after she described the first PorchFest in Springfield as a “very grassroots” movement. She said her connections from owning a music store helped her find acts to book, and her daughter handed out fliers to advertise the event.

Paying the performers was a cornerstone of hosting the event, she said. While other similar festivals had people playing music on their own front porches, the organizers wanted PorchFest to “start out at a higher level” with professional, paid entertainment.

“Our goal was to have a fairly elevated festival,” Parrish Stone said. “Now, we have people who have moved to Springfield or opened businesses because they went to PorchFest.”

Each year, the support for the festival and the neighborhood has grown, Marron said.

“We're really proud of the fact that we're able to do an event of this quality and magnitude and really showcase the beauty of the neighborhood,” Marron said. “I'm really excited about the fact that it is in the Northwest quadrant for the first time in the history of PorchFest, which is a part of the neighborhood that has never hosted PorchFest. There's a thriving, historically African American small business community on Pearl Street that's going to be at the heart of where our festival is.”

Allowing the festival’s diversity to reflect Springfield’s diversity in a range of categories — from race to income to age to gender to sexual orientation — has been an important component to the inclusivity of the event, Marron said.

“I want people to walk away being like, ‘I can't believe it was free, right?’ Like, that was an incredibly high quality festival, and Springfield was in an amazing place that we are super excited to come visit and hang out next weekend,” she said.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Springfield Preservation and Revitalization to host PorchFest this weekend