Special Project: Holiday Festival

The 63rd Street Growth Commission’s guiding philosophy is to stay in touch with business owners in our district to ensure our initiatives generate the greatest return on investment for area businesses. With this key concept in mind, we spent early 2009 re-evaluating our 30-year tradition of hosting an annual holiday parade.

The results of our assessment were clear. While the parade drew thousands of people to the district, it also shut down traffic during one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In addition, the parade took a herculean effort by staff and required an enormous investment of financial resources; resources that might be better invested in a different way.
The Growth Commission gathered input from business owners and began looking at alternatives. Our research showed that other cities – including international tourism areas like Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Milan – were experiencing enormous success hosting holiday festivals.

As a result, in 2009 the Growth Commission hosted its first annual holiday festival. The Holiday Festival took place over the course of four weeks – starting in November and continuing through the third week in December. During the four weeks we hosted 77 different performances, five each day, six days per week.

With a diverse representation of street performers, bands, and vocal groups, the events themselves appealed to both young and old. While interactive street performers moved along 63rd Street engaging shoppers in their entertaining antics, musicians and vocalists set up in local businesses, including Marquette Bank, Subway, Walgreen's, Sears, and the Rio Valley grocery store.

The results show that making the switch to a Holiday Festival was a success! Of the 50 completed surveys we received, the festival earned a 9.5 out of 10. Based on this, we plan to host a Holiday Festival again in 2010.

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