SUCCESS AND WHAT’S NEXT

The newly grown grass along the Bangor waterfront has yet to recover from the trampling of the 80,000 or so people who attended the National Folk Festival last weekend, but the planners already are talking about what they would do better next year. That’s to be expected, of course, but city officials might find a few minutes not only to congratulate themselves for their success but to contemplate how to apply their experience elsewhere.

First, the success. The music was wonderful, diverse, of excellent quality. The number of happy listeners who said how great it was to have so many people downtown was too high to count. The city’s effort at cleaning itself up before the festival helped significantly. The regular comments about how friendly Bangor is reflected how good a time everyone was having.

It was hoped a bucket brigade to collect funds for festival promotion would raise $12,000; it raised $28,000. Even the identified problems – more food, more toilets, fewer dogs – are manageable for the next two years.

Then, the contemplation. The 80,000 was a surprise. The weather may have helped some. But recall that the turnout for the Penobscot Theatre’s Maine Shakespeare Festival initially was a surprise. And the enthusiastic response to the Husson Piano Recital Series was a surprise. Going back 20 years, the positive reaction to Bangor’s River City Festival was such a surprise that the consensus was the city should do this sort of thing more often.

It’s not just the arts. It’s sports – attendance at the Senior League World Series was a surprise. And it’s commerce – the founder of Staples office supply, Tom Stemberg, visited Bangor recently and noted that he originally was surprised the city could support even one of his stores, where it now has two. But it is in the arts, as an essential part of the cultural tourism the state has tried for years to promote, that Bangor seems most happily astonished, and it is from there that it should try to extend its string of surprising successes.

Perhaps the clearest change that could come of this would occur at next year’s festival, where a better integration of the festival and the downtown should take place. The city can either move more of the downtown to the riverfront, or move more of the festival downtown in some manner. The point would be to introduce the city more thoroughly and allow downtown merchants to reap more of the benefits of the festival.

The larger issue is what to do with the information that many people here are eager to see and participate in more of the arts and more festivals, especially if they combine a populist, good-time feel and high-quality events. Five years ago, demographics and marketing expert Peter Francese told Bangor that it could prosper as a destination for tourists who crave art, culture, great eating, places of ecological interest and education in travel. His observations sounded too unlike Bangor to be true. Now, who could deny the possibility?

The next two years will go by in a hurry, and Bangor soon will be saying farewell to the folk festival. What comes next will depend on what the city learned last weekend and whether it is content to be only surprised.