200,000 attend one day Luminaria Art Festival downtown

[sirkingwilliam]

200,00 in it's third year and double what it did in its first year.


It sucks that the city reduced the size of the footprint which led to many complaints. I'm sure the footprint will be bigger next year.

[texboy]

This is great news! Glad to see people making their way into downtown.

[Trae]

Cool for SA. It usually packed around this time of year anyway. Know I'll be there tomorrow.

[kornbread]

We went this year for the first time and it was kind of a drag because it was just too crowded.

The Downtown Blog in the Express pretty much states my feelings about this year:
http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblog...luminaria.html

It kind of felt more like a Fiesta event and it was just too hard to see any of the performers or exhibits. The last couple of years sounded pretty cool, but apparently they didn't really have the budget to keep it as it was in the past.

[miaht82]

Originally Posted by kornbread

We went this year for the first time and it was kind of a drag because it was just too crowded.

The Downtown Blog in the Express pretty much states my feelings about this year:
http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblog...luminaria.html

It kind of felt more like a Fiesta event and it was just too hard to see any of the performers or exhibits. The last couple of years sounded pretty cool, but apparently they didn't really have the budget to keep it as it was in the past.

Same here.
I heard great things about it but went in with lower expectations because of the budget cuts.
It was rather difficult to see any performances except for the larger stage between the Fairmont and La Villita. It was "Fiesta-like" crowded and the flow of the exhibits could have been helped by better signage or better scheduling of the events. Hope they don't have any budget issues for next year.

[oldmanshirt]

lol, I can understand from reading the blog and the comments why people were frustrated and disappointed.

But come on, there's only a handful of cities in the US (and extremely few the size of SA) where you'll ever hear the words "there were just too many people downtown". Usually its the opposite

Case in point: I was in downtown Kansas City this past weekend during the Big XII championship, and it was nearly impossible to find a parking spot, people were crowding the streets, and the whole area had a lot of energy. For KC, that's probably the busiest downtown will get all year, but for SA that's probably a slow saturday in July.