Spring Fair draws record crowds, profit

The 41st annual Spring Fair was held this past weekend at Hopkins, continuing the yearly springtime custom of food and festivity at Homewood. Hopkins's Spring Fair is the largest student-run university celebration in the country, and this year's festival was the best attended and most profitable in its history, Spring Fair leaders said.
"It was, in a word, fantastic," junior Michelle Kirk, Executive Co-Chairman for Spring Fair 2012, said in the aftermath of the weekend, which drew record crowds from Hopkins and the wider local community.
In spite of unprecedented attendance, the activities kept in line with past tradition: food vendors gathered on the Freshman Quad, local craftsmen sold their products on Keyser Quad and hundreds flocked to the Beer Garden in the President's Garden where student groups served those of age as a fundraising effort.
Spring Fair this year, however, saw a higher number of food and craft vendors, a larger "children's section" in front of Gilman Hall and the return of carnival rides, back after a hiatus due to Brody Learning Commons construction. The keynote concert, headlined by Passion Pit, sold out for the first time since Spring Fair staffers incorporated
See SPRING FAIR, page A4
SPRING FAIR, from A1
the Friday night music event in the mid-1990s.
All of the weekend's events were organized, hosted and sponsored by undergraduates. This year's Spring Fair staff - spearheaded by co-chairmen Kirk and senior Drew Rosenberg - was comprised of 46 Hopkins students working in tandem with administrators, the Student Government Association (SGA), the Johns Hopkins Organization for Programming (the HOP), student radio station WJHU, the City of Baltimore and various security agencies.
"We couldn't have done this alone. We start with a budget of essentially zero every year, and we extend our reach wherever we can for help - doing our best to keep it a student-run event, of course," Rosenberg said.
The weekend began on Thursday night with a fireworks display over Levering Quad, followed by a beer party on the Levering Patio sponsored by PJ's Pub. Food trucks arrived the Freshman Quad by 8 a.m. the next morning; come noon, crowds had gathered in anticipation fair fare, including Spring Fair staples like fried Oreo cookies and jumbo turkey legs, from vendors from the Baltimore area.
The Beer Garden, held annually in the President's Garden, drew masses from its opening at noon on Friday until taps closed at 7 p.m. on Saturday. Various campus philanthropic organizations manned the taps, which offered sixteen varieties of beer, including more refined brews of local microbreweries.
"It's a great endeavor," Kirk said. "A beer ticket is sold, people use that ticket at the stalls operated by student groups to buy a beer, and the proceeds from that ticket go to that student group."
This year, profits from beer ticket sales topped $30,000, Spring Fair treasurer Morgan Byce said.
However, in spite of the success of the Beer Garden, Kirk and Rosenberg dispelled the notion that the weekend-long celebration is simply three days devoted to intoxication. Kirk cited the accomplishments of Greek life philanthropy events outside of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, such as Pike Bike and Pi a Pi Phi.
Kirk also asserted the staunch security at venues where alcohol flowed freely. While Hopkins security officials patrolled the Beach for bottles and cans, employees of Security, Athletic Facilities & Events (S.A.F.E.) Management, a local contract security firm hired by Spring Fair staff, guarded the gates of the Beer Garden to inspect identification.
Rosenberg stated that Spring Fair staff is not liable for any alcohol-related infractions or incidents, but expressed relief that this year saw few of either.
"We like to keep our bases covered, which is why we're tight on security," he said.
"I've had three years of experience, and this was a pretty smooth year," Kirk added.
Apart from the rain, which started late Saturday night and cut short many of Sunday's events, the weekend's greatest damper was not on campus, across the street, Kirk said.
"Spring Fair endorses the First Amendment, and encourages activists to use the marketplace we provide as a forum," she said. "The pro-life and pro-choice debate is a consistently hot topic, and we support the discourse as long as it doesn't detract from the rest of the weekend. That wasn't the case this year."
She alluded to the pro-life assembly that gathered on the Charles Street median across from the Beach on Friday afternoon, using posters containing graphic images of aborted fetuses to distract passersby. Within an hour, a handful of students arrived outside of Charles Street Market with homemade signs, objecting the protest halfway across the street.
"Fortunately, it dispelled pretty quickly," Kirk said. "In all, there weren't too many speed bumps this weekend - I was in bed by nine on Sunday night."