Jen Van Tieghem | Uptown News

Adams Avenue’s bar-based acoustic festival gets better with age

Each of the past three years Adams Avenue Unplugged has strived to bring patrons out to Kensington, Normal Heights, and Antique Row for live music and into the venues of these communities. It’s seen it share of struggles since its evolution from the Roots Festival to its newest iteration, but it looks like this year’s event, which was held on the weekend of April 26, could be the turning point.

For a festival that predominately took place indoors in years prior — filling various bars, restaurants, and coffeehouses — this year’s event had plenty of outdoor appeal as well. Food booths, outdoor stages and trolley rides kept event-goers moving along with plenty to see and do.

“The event has steadily grown for the past three years, with this year being the best so far,” said Scott Kessler, Executive Director of the Adams Avenue Business Association. “Our crowds continue to grow — with this year’s Sunday crowd being the largest yet.”

This is great news for a festival that had to redefine itself from the street fair format and continue to coax people to come enjoy the music and patronize the businesses.

“Most people have come to embrace the new event format including our business owners,” Kessler explained. “But some folks are disappointed we changed from the Adams Roots Festival format.”

Indeed it seemed the business owners did have a positive response to the 2014 attendance.

“This year’s Adam’s Avenue Unplugged was by far the best we’ve seen,” co-owner of Jayne’s Gastropub Jon Erickson said. “We we’re packed to capacity both days … and will be expanding our music schedule next year.

It can be a tough event to stage monetarily, but the area’s businesses banded together to assure a successful Kickstarter campaign that made it all possible,” Erickson continued. “We are starting our eighth year on the Avenue and it is great to see so much positive, grass roots growth happening here.”

Incorporating a campaign on Kickstarter, an online crowdsourcing platform, was just one new item Kessler and the AABA implemented to make the event profitable.

“We did a number of things this year to help the event’s bottom line including expanding the vendor area, selling reserved seating to our national touring acts, selling sponsorship and running [the] successful Kickstarter campaign,” Kessler said. “Our books on the event are not final yet but it looked like we didn’t lose money this year.”

Another official music venue for the event, Sycamore Den, opened their doors for the first time during the 2013 Unplugged and this year saw a solid turnout as well.
“We had a great event, and we piggy backed our anniversary party on Saturday with a parking lot beer garden and it was well received,” co-owner Nick Zanoni said.

As Kessler and company are now hard at work on the next upcoming events in the area — Taste of Adams (June 29) and the Adams Avenue Street Fair (September 27 & 28) — they’ve already got their sights on next year’s Unplugged.

“We have just started our process of evaluating this year event and suggesting improvements,” Kessler said.

Learn more about the events and neighborhoods at adamsavenuebusiness.com.