In the late ‘80s and ‘90s, downtown Austin's Pecan Street Festival was the place to be.
Attendees shuffled by hundreds of vendor tents run by eager painters, musicians, chefs and other local creatives trying to market their goods. And Sixth Street, known then as Pecan Street, had plenty of space for them.
“If you really wanted to be an artist, you had to do the Pecan Street Festival,” said Lynda Coleman, a painter and a leader of Generational Artists Collective, an Austin-based group for youth painters. She has worked the festival since 1996.
But in the last 30 years, the festival's long-term location on East Sixth Street turned into a hotspot for the bustling nightlife scene. The homeless population in the area also increased, according to event organizer Luis Zapata.
Festival organizers announced in late March that the festival, scheduled for this weekend, would move to the Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave, due to the “recent restructuring” on Sixth Street they said presented an “unsustainable financial future” for the event.
Zapata, who has worked with the festival's planning company for two decades, said the city's addition of sidewalk barricades in January would've cut out a third of the usual vendors if the festival stayed downtown.
Coleman said the new location gives everyone more "breathing room."
"[Organizers] want everybody to be safe, and it would have been a strain to try to push to keep it on Sixth Street," she said.
She and artist Joseph Worth both said that in recent years, setting up their festival tents at 5 a.m. felt stressful and scary. It was cramped as vendors rushed in to claim the first-come first-serve space, and parking to unload supplies was limited and expensive.
Worth said he stopped working the festival in 2016 because of the conditions on Sixth Street. He said homeless individuals sometimes approached vendors and made them feel uncomfortable.
“Artists stopped coming,” said Worth, who moved to Austin in 2007 and had considered the festival prestigious.
“It wasn't even just gross," he said. "It was scary. It was a real concern for people out there.”
Worth isn't completely sold on the move to the Hill Country Galleria. He said he worries about vendors making back the $600 booth fee trying to sell their products in a center with over 100 restaurants and shops.
“It's gonna go from a festival event to essentially just people shopping,” he said.
But Coleman said she feels confident the new location “will be a blessing” for both vendors and attendees.
“I see people on Facebook complaining that they moved it," she said. “My question to them is: When was the last time you've been to Pecan Street Festival? People have a lot to say, but you don't know the changes of everything" since 1996.
