Clear skies and a light breeze provided the perfect backdrop for the numerous musical acts and vendors that lined Park Avenue for fun and fundraising on Saturday.
Park Avenue's SummerFest Uptown drew Hot Springs residents to the Tower of Strength Ministries parking lot and the Cottage Court Motel courtyard to enjoy food, music and art. The festival was put on by Park Avenue Community Association, which sought to use the event to promote the area and raise money for community projects.
SummerFest coordinator Hannah Mills said the festival, now in its fourth year on Park Avenue, was originally put on as a pop-up event with the goal of drawing people to Park Avenue.
"It was so successful and so much fun that we decided we wanted to continue it," Mills said.
Mills said SummerFest has grown each year since its inception, and has expanded to the point that it is now held at two locations on Park Avenue, featuring roughly 25 vendors.
Along with the numerous vendors, the festival also featured a stage for live music at each location. It also featured a dunking booth sponsored by the Hot Springs Civitan Club at Tower Of Strength with local dignitaries that included Steve Arrison, CEO of Visit Hot Springs, Bill Solleder, Visit Hot Springs' special events manager, and Jim Miller of Mid America Science Museum taking a plunge.
The dunking booth was set up by the Civitan Club to raise money for the purchase of ADA-accessible playground equipment for David F. Watkins Memorial Park. The park is one of the development projects in the area.
Civitan member and dunk tank coordinator John Hoefl said that his club had already raised $3,700 to go toward the project. He said that the club's goal was to raise between $1,500 and $2,000 on Saturday, and that he was encouraged by the support he had seen.
"Everybody in Hot Springs has come out to support this," Hoefl said.
PACA President Angie Ezekiel said that the Watkins Park project currently has a goal of raising roughly $300,000 for its completion. Other Park Avenue projects that the festival raised money for included water gardens for flood control, reconstruction of the sidewalks and the installation of vintage lighting from the Majestic lawn up to Circle Drive. Mills said that the lighting project has a goal of roughly $70,000.
PACA President Angie Ezekiel said that her organization had received donations for the projects at the festival Saturday.
"That's just what SummerFest is about," Ezekiel said. "It's to show people that this is a great neighborhood, and that it's fun to be here, and also to raise money for decorative lighting on Park Avenue."
Mills said that one of the things that she enjoys about the revitalization of Park Avenue is its generational diversity. She said that people of all ages have ben pouring into the community.
Such diversity could be seen at SummerFest, which had people of all ages both facilitating and visiting the event.
"We have the millennial crowd, who is coming in and buying property and doing wonderful things. Oh, awesome stuff. We have the oldies like me who have been around for 100 years and are still right there in the middle of it," Mills said. "It's a wide spectrum of people who are involved, and that makes it really awesome."
Ezekiel said that Park Avenue's revitalization efforts come from those who are in the community itself. She said that the revitalization is all about taking the "big ideas" within the community and making them a reality.
"This is grass roots," Ezekiel said about the revitalization efforts. "Somehow or another, our ideas are growing, and so is our support. That's what Hot Springs is all about -- supporting each other."
Local on 05/14/2017