Hillyard Festival

Gary Garberg is banking on selling more T-shirts than usual at his Greenburo.com store.

Bill Deardorff, who works a few blocks south, is hoping business picks up at the newly opened Hillyard Station breakfast and sandwich shop.

One certainty is that the foot traffic on North Market Street will hit its summer high this weekend as the neighborhood celebrates the Hillyard Festival.

This year’s festivities run through 5 p.m. Sunday. Entertainment, games, food and vendor booths will be set up at Harmon Park on North Market between Decatur and Bismark avenues.

The Hi-Jinks parade will be today at 10 a.m. The parade will follow Market Street a couple of blocks, north of Wellesley, and will end at Harmon Park. The day will kick off with a pancake feed at 7 a.m. at VFW Post 1475.

Barry Lee White, a Central Valley High School graduate and country recording artist, will headline the entertainment. White and his band Moonshine will perform at 6 p.m. today. White moved to Nashville in 1996.

“A lot of people will come out to the neighborhood,” Garberg said while reflooring his shop at 5220 N. Market St. one recent morning.

This year’s parade theme, “Think of yesterday, dream of tomorrow,” is fitting for a festival believed to be the oldest in Spokane.

According to festival historians, no one is certain when the festival got started, but by 1913 there was an annual harvest festival held the first weekend of October. The festival was a place where Hillyard residents and farmers gathered to celebrate the harvests. The name “Hillyard Hi-Jinks,” a name associated with its carnival atmosphere, is to believed to have started in 1935.

For many of its patrons, the festival and parade brings back memories of growing up in Hillyard.

“It was a lot busier,” said Desi Bucknell, a lifelong Hillyard resident and third-year president of the Hillyard Festival Association. “Once the railroad went out, it killed Hillyard.”

However, despite the decline in numbers and the shrinking funds, there are those, like Bucknell, who keep the festival and parade afloat.

This year, Bucknell explained, the festival is not using city tables and benches at Harmon Park. Bucknell said the festival can not afford the rental fee of $20 per set. Instead, festival organizers will haul in their own tables and chairs.

City parks official Tony Madunich explained that rental fees for community-sponsored programs are not new. Until this year, Harmon Park was used for a summer children’s festival before and after the festival and the city would leave the tables and chairs for Hillyard Days. That summer program has been cut.

Madunich said organizers from Bloomsday, the South Perry Street Fair, Artfest, as well as church picnics in city parks pay for rentals. Fees for amplifiers, tents and other items have been waived for the Hillyard Festival.

As the big weekend closes in, Bucknell was asked whether the committee will be able to make it financially.

“Are we going to be in the red or the black?” Bucknell asked. “We may only have one penny, but we’ll be in the black.”

Park vendors and merchants with stores on Market Street, meanwhile, are hoping to do better than that.