The Ethnic Festival: Michigan Street's summer crowd

1974 — mid-1990s · Michigan Street, downtown; then Howard Park

The festival: For more than twenty summers, downtown South Bend's great street gathering was the Ethnic Festival — the city's nationalities fed and paraded in the open, on Michigan Street, in the heart of the city the nationalities had built. The History Museum's own account fixes its line: established in 1974, it ran each summer for over twenty years on Michigan Street, and in the mid-1990s it was transformed and renamed Summer in the City and moved to Howard Park. The museum keeps its photograph of the festival in full crowd, dated about 1985. The festival's name outlasted the museum's renaming in at least one place: the Tribune's coverage of the 2001 season still billed an Ethnic Festival Parade, with 112 units scheduled to step off — motorcycle escorts from four departments at its head — a parade lineup the paper printed unit by unit. Both tellings stand: the museum's institutional line, and the Tribune's 2001 parade under the old name.

The succession: The Ethnic Festival's idea — the city eating its way through its own peoples — did not die with its name. It survives in the parish and hall festivals that anchor the present calendar: the Greek Festival at St. Andrew's, the Dyngus Day circuit of the west-side halls, the St. Patrick's Day parade and the greening of the East Race, each told in its own entry below. The downtown street festival in its modern dress is Art Beat's, founded in 2003 — an arts festival rather than an ethnic one, but the same Michigan Street instinct, and told in the closing entry of this section.

Sources:

1. The History Museum, South Bend — "Ethnic Festival": established 1974, over twenty years on Michigan Street, transformed into Summer in the City in the mid-1990s and moved to Howard Park; photograph circa 1985, donated by the South Bend Tribune.
2. South Bend Tribune, 2001 — "A diverse tradition: Ethnic Festival and Parade to offer more music, floats, fun," with the parade lineup of 112 units.