Re:SET Chicago, Michelada Fest draw complaints as large concerts kick off in neighborhood parks
When superstar musicians take to the stage in Riis Park starting Friday, Carlos Arjona will be listening whether he wants to or not.
The Belmont Cragin resident didn’t know the three-day Re:SET Chicago concert series would be coming to the park across the street from his house until a friend told him in late May. He saw no signs and got no warning.
“It was just dumped on our neighborhood,” said Arjona, whose home faces the festival’s stage.
Residents across Belmont Cragin and Pilsen are sharing similar frustrations about a lack of community engagement ahead of two music festivals scheduled in their parks this weekend: Re:SET and the two-day Michelada Fest in Pilsen’s Harrison Park.
The detractors argue event organizers didn’t seek input from residents and the festivals don’t benefit the neighborhoods. Some complain that the music festivals will block park access, harm the environment, pump noise into the air, take away parking spots and limit transit options.
Meanwhile, festival organizers say they’ve worked with the community by offering free tickets, creating space for local vendors and hosting local job fairs to staff the events. The festivals will spur spending and highlight the communities, they say.
The drumbeat of complaints from residents has grown across the city in recent summers as the large outdoor festivals take to Chicago parks. Last week, residents from North Lawndale and Little Village argued whether the three-day rock music festival Riot Fest should occur in Douglass Park as the Park District’s Board of Supervisors granted the festival a permit at a public meeting last week. The festival left Humboldt Park seven years ago because of neighbor complaints, and has been dogged by frustrated neighbors in Douglass Park ever since.
Revenue generated from permits for large events make up around $10 million of the Park District’s $372 million annual budget, according to park officials at a recent meeting. The Park District identifies “large-scale events” as a way to add revenue while keeping park program fees affordable and relying less on property taxes in its 2023 budget, which puts money from events such as Re:SET and Michelada Fest into a general fund.
The festivals don’t add a huge amount to the Park District’s budget, said Juanita Irizarry, executive director of park advocacy and preservation nonprofit Friends of the Park. But even if the large events aren’t wanted by communities, the Park District may feel pressure to approve festivals because it has budgeted for revenue from them, she added.
“The Park District for many years has been focused on revenue generation first without thinking about who’s bearing the burden,” Irizarry said. “And then they tell the community that if they don’t have these concerts, they’ll have less money for programming as a way to put pressure on people.”
‘Slap in the face to us working families in Pilsen’
In Pilsen, gates were erected around Harrison Park on Monday, five days before the start of Michelada Fest, a celebration of Mexican food and culture, the park’s first major music festival of the summer. Nearby residents say the gates limit activity in the public park and inconvenience neighborhood children and families.
On Wednesday morning, residents gathered to deliver a letter to the Harrison Park supervisor, once again emphasizing their opposition to the megafests that take place in the park, saying that the Park District and festival organizers broke their promise of being “less restrictive this year,” by erecting the fences around the park so early.
Though the park has not been closed, the gates prevented normal activities from taking place, said Claudia Galeno, coordinator of Women For Green Spaces who lives close to the park.
“The private use of public green spaces — which we pay for and maintain with our hard-earned tax dollars — to enrich private businesses is the ultimate slap in the face to us working families in Pilsen and elsewhere,” Galeno wrote in the June 21 letter to the supervisor of the park Tony Gonzales and the park’s advisory board.
According to organizers, the fence around the park had to be erected days in advance to ensure proper and safe production for the event where they expect at least 5,000 attendees a day. But even though it was gated, the doors to enter the park, including the softball field, basketball court, playground and field house were still open to the public, said Michele Lemons, a spokesperson for the Park District.
In previous years, the setup began a day before the festival, said Fernando Nieto, a founder of the event.
“But that was too risky,” he said. “Still, we made sure that access to the park was still available.”
To be sure, not every resident is against the festival. Michelada Fest organizers said they expected hundreds of community members at their ticket giveaway on Thursday night.
Miguel Torres, one of the co-founders of the festival, said that the giveaway shows their appreciation for residents of the area and to ensure they feel welcome at the festival that was created for and by Latinos.
“It was not a way to ignore their concerns,” he said on a phone call with Tribune. “We acknowledge their concerns and have tried to address them the best way that we can in several meetings.”
Nieto and Torres, who also run My House Music festival at Harrison Park in August, were both born and raised in Pilsen. They say that they began the festivals to highlight and celebrate their culture, and to invest in the neighborhood and its people. As ticket prices have increased to match production costs, the number of free tickets to area residents have also increased, they said.
“This is still the community’s festival,” Nieto said.
General admission tickets for Michelada Fest are $89 each day, plus taxes and fees. The weekend ticket is $149. Musicians Prince Royce, Natti Natasha, Gerado Ortiz and Alex Lora Y El Tri are headlining the festival.
Since its inception in 2018, the founders have donated to several local programs, including Pilsen Athletic Little League summer programs.
Galeno, who runs a not-for-profit that promotes green spaces in the city and helps the growth of pollinators in Pilsen, became concerned about the festivals last year, when she realized that several activities had to be rescheduled, that her neighbors could not find parking spaces and the streets were left full of garbage afterward.
Over the last few months, Galeno said she’s called for several meetings with the organizers, the Harrison Park supervisor, Tony Gonzalez, the advisory board and the office of Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th.
“But they ignore our request. We simply don’t want the festival here,” she said.
Lucia Moya, Sigcho-Lopez’s chief of staff, said that the alderman participated in several meetings to address the neighbors’ concerns while also listening to the organizers and “trying to find solutions.” Moya however, did not clarify if Sigcho-Lopez favored or opposed the event.
For the first time, there will be an emergency hotline for neighbors to report major inconveniences, a tow truck available to remove cars blocking garages and fire hydrants and cars without permits parked on restricted streets.
But “ultimately, the park makes that decision of allowing the festival or not,” Moya said.
The president of the Harrison Advisory Council, Tina Iturralde said the process to approve the festivals is flawed by not surveying the residents that live in the surrounding areas of parks where mega festivals take place.
“We didn’t have a final say in this, our monthly meetings became a forum for those discussions,” Iturralde said. “The Park District has its process and that process does not include the park’s advisory council approval.”
Torres and Nieto said they are committed to continue meeting with Galeno and the group of neighbors that have voiced their concerns about the festival at the neighborhood’s park before the My House Music Festival in August.
Galeno said that while she recognizes that the event can be a sign of success of the Latino community, the event should be hosted in an area where the green spaces in the city are not compromised.
“The tree roots are very fragile, so driving trucks over them is very damaging to the few tress that they do have,” said Elsa Anderson, a professor in an environmental science program teaching urban ecology at Northwestern, who joined Galeno to deliver the letter.
‘Just a nice warning would be great’
Community organizer Warren Williams said he didn’t hear about Re:SET in Belmont Cragin’s Riis Park until he got an advertisement for tickets in February.
“We started talking about it with other neighbors, and no one had known about it. And that for me was extremely concerning,” said Williams, who narrowly missed a runoff in the 30th Ward’s aldermanic race.
When he and other community organizers knocked on the doors of homes close to the park, residents were surprised and upset to hear the festival was coming, he said.
The activists met in March with Re:SET’s organizers and circulated a petition that garnered 800 signatures demanding the festival make commitments to the community or move, he said. In early June, they met with the Park District’s CEO, who told them it was too late to move the festival, he added.
Williams predicts the festival will leave the park “destroyed” for the rest of the summer and shared fears that police will struggle to staff the event with Chicago’s Pride Parade also underway.
The process to permit large events should involve more residents, possibly through mandatory efforts to publicize events under consideration with flyers and public forums, he said. If residents wanted the festival, he’d be for it, he added.
“We would have been OK with it if there was some kind of community agreement, or if we just heard about it,” Williams said.
Re:SET’s community relations director, George Herrera, told the Tribune the festival has engaged the community and will benefit Belmont Cragin. The event’s organizers offered local businesses discounted vendor spaces, hosted two local job fairs to staff the event, would repair any damage to the park and are giving away 600 tickets to residents, he said.
He argued the community organizers leading the pushback are operating in bad faith and unfairly riling residents up by inaccurately describing the festival’s engagement efforts and impact.
Re:SET’s organizers had intended to start publicly rolling out their community benefits and engagement efforts before community organizers “jumped the gun” when it was first announced the festival would come to Riis Park, he said. The community groups initially asked how they might be able to collaborate with the festival, he added.
“This is what they do. They put out bad information, they want nothing to happen, they shut everything down, they want no opportunity,” said Herrera, who owns the Festival Cubano that has previously occurred in Riis Park and also works as the community engagement director for the annual, 50,000-attendee Riot Fest in North Lawndale.
Herrera said he thinks the city and Park District’s process for working with large event organizers should be more robust, clearer and consistent. He also agreed with the proposition some critics have made that a portion of the money large event organizers pay to use a park should go toward that park.
“I firmly believe the parks belong to all of us. This is a celebration of music, culture and bringing family and friends together,” Herrera said of Re:SET. “It’s a win-win for everybody.”
One-day tickets for the AEG Presents-hosted Re:SET are r $129. Three-day tickets cost $325. The festival will feature headliners Steve Lacy, boygenius and LCD Soundsystem.
Belmont Cragin’s Ald. Ruth Cruz, 30th, told the Tribune she is opposed to Riis Park hosting the festival, which was initially approved in the winter with support from retired Ald. Ariel Reboyras.
While she’s now focused on the event running safely and respectfully, she said more resident input is needed before future large events are permitted.
“I understand there was no community engagement. Going forward, I will handle this event differently,” Cruz said, adding that she isn’t opposed to large events or concerts if the community supports them.
A better process for approving large events could include organizers getting feedback from residents and laying out how the festival will benefit the neighborhood before approval, Cruz said. She plans to propose legislation in the City Council requiring 2% of ticket revenue for ticketed large events in parks to go directly to the park in which they take place, she said.
Some large events fit the scale of a park and gain interest from residents, making them a good fit for neighborhoods, said Irizarry of Friends of the Park. But the festivals can also cause pain to the neighborhoods, she added.
Potential festivals need “real, authentic input” from communities and a measurable amount of revenue that goes back to the community before they’re approved, she added.
Many large festivals, including Riot Fest, Michelada Fest and Re:SET, occur in parks in less wealthy neighborhoods where people of color live, Irizarry said. She criticized the benefits the festivals currently give to communities as “crumbs” used to gain support from a few nonprofit groups to make it seem like whole communities support the events and argued large events can hurt local businesses by pulling customers off sidewalks and inside festival gates.
Arjona, a postal worker, first saw eighteen-wheelers moving Re:SET’s equipment into the park Tuesday. His daughters thought the trucks were setting up the small carnival that sometimes pops up in the park, he said.
Parking will be a pain this weekend, he said. It would be difficult for his older parents to walk to his house if they couldn’t find a spot for their car.
“It’s gonna be loud. It’s gonna be messy, there’s going to be trash, people urinating in the alley,” Arjona said. “Just a nice warning would be great.”
When he’s hosting parties at his house, he tells his neighbors that it might get a little loud as a courtesy, he added.
