By Tony Burchyns
Morgan Hill
– The Mushroom Mardi Gras festival is moving off Monterey Road
and relocating to the Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center
after an early street closure and rowdiness hurt business on the
main drag last year.
Morgan Hill – The Mushroom Mardi Gras festival is moving off Monterey Road and relocating to the Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center after an early street closure and rowdiness hurt business on the main drag last year.
The 28th annual festival will open May 26 at the community center near the corner of Monterey Road and E. Dunne Avenue. Parts of the two-day event will extend down Depot Street to Third Street.
Organizers decided to move the yearly festival off Monterey Road after a questionnaire last June showed merchants were unhappy with closing the street at 4pm on a Friday to allow for weekend preparations. The consensus of the merchants was to keep the street open until 9pm.
Festival organizers think that’s too late for the all-volunteer crews to start setting up for the giant event. There was also a desire to move the festival to a more spacious area. An estimated 50,000 people attended last year, though not all at once.
Festival organizers were also swayed by merchants’ complaints of drunken crowds yelling, swearing, blowing whistles and urinating in public.
“If downtown doesn’t want to have the festival, that’s fine,” said event director Sunday Minnich. “We’re really excited about having more room.”
The Mushroom Mardi Gras festival was started in 1980 by Morgan Hill firemen looking to raise money for equipment. The goal of the festival now is to have a safe and fun celebration for the community while raising funds for scholarships and providing a venue for other nonprofits to raise money. Last year, the event raised $30,000 for 30 scholarships, including 28 for seniors at Live Oak High School.
The move to the community and cultural center is the second move in three years. The festival moved downtown in 2005 after losing a long-running spot at Community Park when construction began on the Centennial Recreation Center.
Tony Burchyns covers Morgan Hill for The Times. Reach him at (408) 779-4106 ext. 201 or [email protected].
