Westheimer Street Festival: Exile in the Park : Houston Indymedia

The Fall 2001 Westheimer Street Festival has become an admission charging event for the first time in WestFest history, in response to lagging patrons and revenues. Paying $5.00 to enter might scar the WestFest for generations to come, since the change of venue from the Lower Westheimer to Eleanor Tinsley Park in May 2000.

The festival, once a part of the departed Westheimer Colony Art Festival, now known as the Bayou City Art Festival since 1997, has been the only event that remained in the Montrose, until the mid-1990s, when urban revitalization of the Inner Loop led to an opposition between the festival and gentrifying residents and/or businesses.

During the Fall 2001 event, the newly-formed WestFest Purists Organization, which was formed on October 31, 2000, had an art car in the festival grounds, as a community outreach to fans that still believe in the spirit of a Montrose tradition going back to the early 1970s. The presence of the art car was the debut of a community activist that has canvassed the Westheimet Street Festival in Exile during the Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 events with downloaded copies of the website Death of an Icon - The Westheimer Street Festival.

During the late evening, Houston City Council candidate Andrew C. Burks, Jr. toured the festival site, and noted that the festival has been tarnished, in a way that its Montrose feel was gone. Other fans of the festival feel the same, because the Montrose was significant to the festival's success in years past, up to July 1999, when the first public hearings were held to hold the final Westheimer Street Festival on October 16/17, 1999.

A revised festival ordinance, chaired by the Regulatory Affairs and Ordinance Committee, passed on June 16, 1999, by the Houston City Council, was in response to an outcry from the Montrose community with gentrifying residents complaining to city council that the festival should be eliminated or moved. The festival was moved in response to three separate public hearings during December 1999 and January 2000, where 14 plaintiffs testified in front of a panel at the City Hall Annex building, where pro-Westheimer Street Festival proponents stated that the public hearings were unfair, and none of the proponents weren't given the chance to voice their concerns about WestFest as a community festival rooted in the Montrose tradition. The ousting of the festival was in response to a City Council vote of 12-3 on February 16, 2000. Councilmen Gordon Quan, Bert Keller, and Mark Goldberg voted against the majority, citing that the public hearings between John Florez (Westheimer Street Festival president) and 14 plaintiffs were unfair and flawed.

Currently, the WestFest Purists Organization is conducting a fundraiser for a permanent art car, which will debut in 2002.

More information can be found at the following website: http://seributra_d.tripod.com/armageddon.html
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/westfestpuristsorganization