Douglass Park

Riot Fest Concert Continues Despite Growing Public Protests

By Jim Vail

The Riot Fest Music Concert at Douglass Park begins this weekend and runs Sept.16 - 18 despite growing protests from the community.

Douglass Park has been taken over by private music festivals including Summer Smash in June, Heatwave in July and Riot Fest in September.

Private and public school soccer games have had to be moved from the park to make way for the big money interests. 

My students wrote letters last year addressed to the Alderman to complain about the loud music, traffic congestion and not having access to their beloved park. They wrote that the noise prevented them from sleeping or having any peace and quiet, and one student wrote that his father ordered a pizza from a local vendor that never came because of the increased traffic.

Our soccer teams used to play games at the park before Riot Fest landed here in 2015 after it was kicked out of Humboldt Park where residents also complained. We used to use the park all the time to play softball, football and soccer games with the other public schools in Little Village and Lawndale. 

Now for 47 days during the summer the public cannot use their park!

The Riot Fest and other music venues have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Aldermen and a Latino public relations group that works with the politicians.

Alderman Michael Scott in Lawndale who oversees most of the park was replaced by his sister who told the community at a public hearing this summer that she thinks it is good to see people who do not look like them and no one uses the park anyway. Alderman George Cardenas never held any public meetings and records show he has received tens of thousands of dollars from the Riot Fest organization and the vendors inside the fenced-off public park.

Most concert goers are white who can spend $300 for a weekend pass (or an ultimate pass for almost $2k!) that the area's black and brown people cannot afford. The Juneteenth celebrations were forced to move their celebrations to make way for the Summer Smash. And this was after a school called the Village Leadership Academy fought for three years to rename Douglass Park after the great Civil Rights leader Frederick Douglass.

However, what happened next is a lesson in capitalist city politics. When the current organizers of No Riot Fest in Douglass Park reached out to the teacher at the school who fought to rename the park, she never responded. It turned out that Riot Fest made a donation to their school to shut their mouths. 

We are trying to elevate the fight as the corporate media has finally taken an interest after staying mostly silent since 2015. The outrage over a Riot Fest speaker mocking Spanish-speaking immigrants at a public meeting went viral and they piled on attacking Riot Fest and its glaring corruption and privatization of a public park in a community of low-income people.

The Chicago Park District said special permission needs to be given to music events with over 10,000 people. I would say this is stalling and trying to appear the city is concerned about minority residents being shut out of their park for a quarter of the summer.

More pressure needs to be done and the organizers of No Riot Fest in Douglass Park continue to meet and discuss how to stop this madness. 

They wrote a letter addressing the City of Chicago and the Chicago Park District that focused on the main problems:

1. There are no longer any youth soccer programs held at Douglass Park, residents have longer commute times because of the huge increase in traffic, and families suffer extreme noise levels.

2. The festivals threaten the livelihood of local vendors who typically sell during soccer  games and most other local businesses  see no increased revenue as the traffic and noise tend to drive their regular customers away and the festivals' "no-entry" policies keep festival goers from leaving the grounds to buy food from local vendors.

3. The festivals cause physical damage to the park that already suffers from disinvestment and chronic flooding and repairs made do not address the major infrastructure of the park.

4. The festivals impede Mt. Sinai and St. Anthony Hospitals because crowds and traffic keep ambulances from quickly reaching the hospitals in emergency situations. Mt. Sinai is a Level 1 Trauma Center that serves a huge part of the city, including Cook County Jail.

No privatization of public lands!