Good Times at the Grand Avenue Festival

By Eric Richardson
Published: Saturday, October 07, 2006, at 11:47PM

Eric Richardson

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — The Grand Avenue Festival was today, and I actually made two trips up the hill to check it out. Seemed to be a good turn out, especially for the Kinky show on the Grand Performances stage (no, really, it's a band).

I hung out by the DLANC and Gallery Row booths for a bit and people seemed to be interested in both. One guy came up to the DLANC booth and asked us where the food was. We pointed him down toward the Taste of Downtown tents. He said, "That's good. If you didn't know where the food was, I was going to say you weren't really the neighborhood." I like that. You can trust me; I know where the food is.

I'm sure Ed and Dave will both have better photos than I do, but the shots I took can be seen here.

I can't tell you anything about the Detour Festival. I didn't go. I did, though, set foot in the Laemmle Grande for the first time in my two and half years Downtown. I highly recommend The Departed.

9/27/2007: If you're looking for info on the 2007 festival, you can find that here.

Comments

Kristen writes:

I'm leaving the Grand Performances url here in case people want to check them out further. They had a performance with Kinky and Sidestepper in their Cal Plaza venue in July, and there must've been 6,000 people there. Free. I love them. Yay for stuff in Downtown that isn't just for executives (Yay for 7 eleven!).

# on Oct.09.2006 AT 11:38 AM

Joel C writes:

I thoroughly enjoyed stopping by the Grand Avenue Festival. I really dug the various performances going on. Unfortunately, many of them were inside, which seemed to me counterintuitive for a street festival. Some of them I didn't know about until after the festival was done.

Also, I was a bit underwhelmed with the number of booths...I thought there would be more to buy at this festival.

Anyway, these complaints aside, I think the GAF is a work-in-progress, and I'm sure they will get better as time goes on. Certainly there was interest, judging from the many people that showed up.

# on Oct.09.2006 AT 12:25 PM

Mbeanis writes:

I really wanted to go check out Kinky, but I alreayd had tickets to Detour. Overall, I don't think i would have traded seeing the debut performance of Wired All Wrong for anything. The hot girls in lab coats were a nice touch.

Anybody else go?

I also had a great block of Blackalicious, Basement Jaxx, Peeping Tom, Beck in the evening

# on Oct.09.2006 AT 01:06 PM