How Grand Old Day came back from the dead

For 45 years, the Grand Old Day festival heralded the sound of summer getting started, with drums and jugglers, marching bands and dancers.

But in April, the festival's future looked bleak. The Grand Avenue Business Association announced it was nixing the privately-funded annual street party due to a significant fundraising gap.

Festival attendance remains strong. Organizers say it's often as busy as a day at the Minnesota State Fair, crammed onto two and a half miles of a single St. Paul street. An estimated quarter million people attend the one-day event.

But there are divergent opinions on the festival's worth to businesses. It's a boon for some and a nuisance for others.

The fundraising struggles have emerged as traditional Grand Avenue retail is in flux. Long-time fixtures on the avenue have closed or will soon close, including Creative Kidstuff, Bibelot and Traditions Furniture. New businesses continue to move in and some have joined the business association board. But work on this year's festival got a late start and organizers fell behind in their fundraising goals, said Bob Lawrence, a State Farm insurance agent with an office on the west end of the street.

"A group of us who had not been on the board for very long, came and looked at where we were financially, logistically, volunteers and looked at all those numbers and honestly those were numbers we probably should have been at five months prior," said Lawrence. "And there was one hundred percent agreement that there was no way we were going to pull this off."

That may have been the best thing to happen to Grand Old Day in years.

It got the attention of Andy Rodriguez, a St. Paul parks employee who grew up in the city. He and his friend Ashley LeMay, daughter of a Grand Avenue bar owner, were shocked to hear that the festival was canceled.

"We thought this was a joke at first. Like is this real?" said Rodriguez.

They registered their objections on Facebook by creating a tongue-in-cheek "Grand Old Day Anyway" event page. It was more irony than intention.

The next day, Rodriguez noticed that over 10,000 people had responded to the page.

That got the attention of some Grand Avenue businesses.

Sara Luoma is the general manager at the Lexington restaurant and bar. After Grand Old Day died, she tried to organize some of the other establishments along the avenue to coordinate music or drink specials for the first Sunday in June. Then she saw Rodriguez' and LeMay's post.

"Basically, I said, 'you know, I am going to swallow your little Facebook page here. Do you want to get on board, or do you want me to run you over?'" Luoma recalls. "And they were like, 'Please.'"

The bar crawl iteration of Grand Old Day Anyway was a modest effort — just a couple hundred T-shirts and wristbands sold online via the Lexington's website.

But it was enough to get Grand Old Day organizers back together, said Lawrence. "We saw a grass roots cry out from the community, and we also got some feedback from the businesses," he said. "The following Monday we had a meeting that we invited all the businesses to. There was probably about 60, 70 people there, and (we) talked about what had happened."

One fear expressed during the meeting was that the festival might die, if organizers let it lapse for a year.

"So there were a couple of us, that, probably about four or five that really hit the phones, and we were able to raise about $70,000 in sponsorships over the course of the next couple days," Lawrence said.

That was still less than half of the $200,000 the festival requires to break even.

Then, White Bear Mitsubishi, the car dealer that has sponsored the Grand Old Day's kickoff parade since 2010, nearly doubled its contribution. General manager Richard Herod declined to say how much the dealer donated, but he said it was hard to say no to the festival. Herod is from St. Paul and says he was afraid that Grand Old Day would go the way of the Taste of Minnesota or the July 4th Fireworks in St. Paul.

"There aren't very many hometown-style streets left in this state that have this type of community," Herod said. "And keeping this community together and going is really important."

And come Sunday, for likely about 250,000 people, it'll keep going at least one more year.

Correction (May 29, 2019): Richard Herod's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.