Saturday’s Uptown Street Festival did even better than last year, White Rock BIA executive director Sherri Wilson Morissette said, and the secret seems to have been greater involvement of community groups and merchants in partnership with the BIA.
“It was brilliant,” she said. “There was a huge turnout for the day.”
Morissette said that while a new event, the Bike Parade, had a lower participation than expected, it still proved itself as a fun event, joining such established winners as the Uptown Companion Dog Show, co-sponsored with the SPCA, The Todd Brewer School of Music stage showcasing young performers and the White Rock Millennium Rotary Chili Cook-off Contest, as well as an outdoor exhibition of artwork organized by the Golden Cactus Gallery.
Also successful was the Art Walk held in partnership with Semiahmoo Arts and the Outside The Box Festival of Fibre Art in which art works were displayed in businesses (“We actually ran out of Art Walk passports,” Morissette noted), face painting, BMX demonstrations and a bicycle-safety obstacle course at Central Plaza, which drew children and generally raised the profile of the White Rock Community Policing office, and the Red Beans and Rice Jazz Band and the Tropitonics Steel Band, both of which were kept on beyond their allotted time to continue entertaining the crowds.