Riot Fest is an annual rock music event in Chicago that in most years garners headlines on which acts — often veteran artists who don’t tour all that often — will top the lineup. For the record, this year it will be Beck, Pavement, Fall Out Boy and Slayer.
But the big news surrounding Riot Fest in 2024 is the festival’s surprise move to SeatGeek Stadium in suburban Bridgeview from Douglass Park in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side, which Riot Fest has called home since 2015. The knotty narratives tied to Riot Fest’s departure have little to do with live music; instead, they traverse familiar Chicago issues such as neighborhood disinvestment, dysfunctional city government and the city’s lousy business environment, among others.
Riot Fest co-founder Michael Petryshyn, better known as Riot Mike, blamed the Chicago Park District for the sudden move. Talking exclusively to the Chicago Sun-Times, Petryshyn told a story — punctuated by delay and “moving goalposts” — that surely is familiar to many who try to do business in Chicago. Everyone has a breaking point, and Petryshyn hit his in his dealings with the Park District, which he blamed “solely” for the outcome.
“I was tired of being misrepresented,” he said. “I was tired of seeing a community we have deep roots in not being attended (to). … It was never an easy relationship. It always felt like the attitude was, ‘Little old Riot Fest, who cares?’”
We’ll get to the Park District in a minute, but the first question is, who really loses here?
We would argue it’s not Petryshyn. He’s found an alternative that works for him — and allows him to pursue his vision of a more immersive event that he felt he couldn’t do in Douglass Park. Smart businesspeople solve problems. It’s not to say decisions aren’t difficult, or don’t involve emotions. They do in this case, as Petryshyn made clear. He’ll always have his memories of Riot Fest’s run on the West Side. But he’s excited to move to a place where, in his words, “people want you.” Ouch.
North Lawndale? That’s another matter. There are some in the community who considered Riot Fest a nuisance and surely are saying to themselves today, “Good riddance.” Those voices of discontent always are the loudest.
But we choose to believe Ald. Monique Scott, whose 24th Ward includes the neighborhood and the park. She doesn’t think Riot Fest’s exit is a good development for an area starved of economic activity and beset by violent crime. Scott wouldn’t be holding that position if a majority of her constituents thought differently. She called the frequent news stories portraying widespread neighborhood opposition to the event a “false narrative.”
“(Riot Fest’s) significant investments in our youth, small businesses and residents have greatly contributed to the well-being and vibrancy of the 24th Ward,” she said in a statement. That sounds a lot like a business that’s a good citizen to us.
The community loses in another way, too, because many people who otherwise wouldn’t visit get a chance to see what that part of the West Side is all about. Yes, much of the West Side is struggling. But that part of town contains much beauty and heart as well, as anyone attending the start and finish of last weekend’s successful half marathon in Garfield Park can attest. Even though the vast majority of the participants were not from its neighborhoods, the West Side welcomed those runners with open arms and they responded in kind.
Another loser in the Riot Fest mess: the city. No one needs reminding that Chicago these days isn’t a city that can afford to drive away revenue-generating events.
Since moving to Douglass Park in 2015, Riot Fest has generated $14 million of revenue for the Park District. That’s gone now, shrewdly grabbed by Bridgeview and its publicly owned SeatGeek stadium (to the chagrin of the Chicago Red Stars women’s soccer team, who say they now have to move a previously scheduled game, but any beef there should be with Bridgeview, not Riot Fest).
One of the ironies is that the Chicago Park District wasn’t going to deny Riot Fest a permit for 2024. But it had dithered to the point that an approval Petryshyn was expecting in April or no later than May had been punted to the board’s June meeting. Hard to blame a festival organizer obliged to commit to paying dozens of artists when he gets anxious three months before showtime and a formal permit still isn’t in hand. That is no way to do business. In a statement following Riot Fest’s decision, the Park District went on about its “comprehensive community engagement process.”
The statement emphasized how the Park District has a new program to reinvest a portion of events revenue into improving and maintaining the parks that host them. That’s great, but the Riot Fest 2024 deal should have been done a long time ago. And, of course, it’s of zero help to the parks in question when event organizers decide that dealing with the Park District is too much of a hassle. Riot Fest’s revenue is gone, and Douglass Park will be seeing none of it under this new policy. Nor will the park see any improvements from the two other summer festivals — Lyrical Lemonade and Heatwave — that left Douglass Park last year.
Park District Superintendent Rosa Escareño said she was surprised; she shouldn’t have been. Nor should Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has plenty of say in what happens at the Park District, should he so choose. He said on Wednesday he was still gathering information on what happened. After he gets the skinny, he needs to have a frank talk with the Park District head about a “community engagement process” that perhaps has grown so “comprehensive” that a major party to the engagement process walks away entirely.
Let’s not forget, the Chicago Park District is the entity Johnson is proposing should own the majestic lakefront stadium that the Chicago Bears want to build. The district’s dealings with “little old Riot Fest” hardly engender confidence.
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