“We can get together and have fun,” Stephanie Bradley said.
The two-day festival, held in the parking lots between MT Bank Stadium and Camden Yards, historically draws about 500,000 people. Organizers said the heat kept the turnout smaller than usual during the day, but by Saturday night the crowd had reached 250,000.
Sprinklers were set up to help keep the revelers cool, and vendors hawked bottles of water for $1.
The festival features musical performances, cultural food and exhibits, more than 150 vendors, contests, health screenings, and financial empowerment activities. Specifically for children, the event offers crafts, youth performances, inflatable obstacle courses and a rock-climbing wall.
Sunday’s headliners include Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte and Salt-N-Pepa. On Saturday’s stage, among the 20 acts which began performing around noon were Chante Moore, Elle Varner and Musiq Soulchild.
Corey Larkins, 20, of Baltimore’s St. Joseph’s neighborhood said he has avoided the festival in the past because of the heat, but this year he wanted to come and see Varner perform. He said the free event is a chance for the city to give back to its residents.
“I love it; I know where my tax dollars are going to,” Larkins said.
In recent years, the event — the largest African-American festival on the East Coast — has been in transition. When Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was elected, the festival faced numerous challenges, said Ian T. Brennan, press secretary for the mayor.
Brennan said to revive the event and make it fiscally sustainable, Rawlings-Blake appointed a new advisory board when she took office, and the city selected greiBO Entertainment to run the event, beginning last year.
“When Mayor Rawlings-Blake took office, the city’s oldest and largest African-American cultural event was found in disarray,” Brennan said in a statement. “GreiBO did a wonderful job running last year’s festival, which was a great success that attracted hundreds of thousands of families from as far as North Carolina and New York to downtown Baltimore, boosting our local economy while ensuring that all vendors were compensated for services rendered.”
As an example of the event’s fame, Brennan said Jet magazine listed the festival among its top five summer destinations.
The festival had been produced from 2001 to 2010 by LaRian Finney of Visionary Marketing Group, but the city changed companies after allegations of mismanagement surfaced. Finney’s attorney has attributed the issues to misunderstandings with a few of the hundreds of vendors involved with the festival during the time that Finney was in charge.
A Baltimore circuit judge awarded $103,000 to three vendors who weren’t paid after the 2010 event.
The city agreed to pay $300,000 toward the cost of this year’s festival, according to a city Board of Estimates document. Overall, the event costs more than $1 million to put on.