City planners can dream of Festival Streets, but it takes the energy of local businesses, artists, and citizens to sustain festivals. First Thursday in the Pearl District/Oldtown Chinatown neighborhoods in downtown Portland is primarily and originally an arts event - but it has developed a lively, universal festival appeal. There are other monthly events in Portland. Alberta St.'s Last Thursdays are quite festive. Hawthorne's 2nd Thursdays fill out the top of the calendar and it looks like third Thursdays are still up for grabs.
As Thursdays in Portland coalesce as festival-ready days, First Thursdays in the Pearl are a nascent monthly urban festival - a presentation of the citizens' creativity and ideas, celebrated at various scales and in a multitude of ways - culturally and geographically focused, yet refreshingly amorphous and lawless.
Through a midwinter haze, the chorus of street drummers and troubadours, throngs of art-gazers and navel-gazers, minglers mingling and finding free beer and hitching a ride on cross-river tentacles like the Russell Shuttle suggest that First Thursdays are becoming more of a Portland event than a Pearl event.
In the short, dark days of February (this week's sun notwithstanding), to gather, celebrate, and rejoice over creation, music, wine, and friendship is to manifest an urban response to the question Will we have festivals on festival streets? Just as it is important for us to spend our days creating solutions, it is vital and restorative for us to collectively share and celebrate our work and ideas publicly and locally. Ensuring that an urban framework for this type of festivity exists is, therefore vital as well.
The brand new Festival Streets in Old Town/Chinatown have yet to be fully incorporated into this monthly festival, but having the urban armature to create celebrations - spontaneous, monthly, or seasonal - is an invitation to al citizen thinkers and dreamers to get out on the street and see what others are saying/doing/wearing/eating/making/singing/drinking - writ in stone.
