For more than 40 years, Lindenhurst residents have marked the end of summer by attending Lindenfest, an annual festival and carnival with local food vendors and live entertainment.
This year was no different, as hundreds of people made their way to the annual festival, which was held from Thursday through Sunday.
“We moved here in 2015, and we started to go [to Lindenfest] that year,” Lindenhurst Trustee Patrick Dickson said. “This is our village’s signature event. It’s a way to get everyone together, via the carnival, the parade, the bingo tent.”
Although the village of Lindenhurst doesn’t run Lindenfest, he said that village trustees are typically involved and volunteer throughout the four-day event.
“We walk with everybody in the parade and toss candy,” Dickson said. “We’re out there, and as a group we run the beer tent on Thursday night. A lot of us volunteer with the bingo tent, or do whatever we can.”
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The festival wasn’t held in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and wasn’t held again in 2022 because the committee wasn’t able to book a carnival, and there was a lack of volunteers. It returned last year, with several new committee members, including Lindenfest President Melissa Forsberg.
“Last year was a learning experience for all of us, as far as how Lindenfest runs,” she said. “We were overwhelmed with the amount of positive feedback that we received last year.
“People seemed really excited about the added children’s activities, and trying different things,” Forsberg said. “I would say last year was a success, so we tried to encompass as much of that as we could this year.”
The Lindenfest committee isn’t the only thing that’s new in the village. Throughout the year, several new businesses have opened in the Lindenhurst Center, a strip mall that runs through Grand Avenue. Some of the new businesses used Lindenfest as a way to attract customers, as the Lindenhurst Center’s parking lot is used for the festival’s overflow parking.
“This year, with all of the overflow parking that goes into the Lindenhurst Center, I think a lot of the new businesses there will get a lot of great exposure,” Dickson said. “We’re promoting [the new businesses] in any way we know how. I think that the increased traffic during Lindenfest will probably have the single greatest impact out of anything that we could do this year.”
One of Lindenhurst’s new businesses, Three Legged Brewing, a coffee brewery in the Lindenhurst Center, also served as one of the festival vendors.
“It’s really good for us to come here, get out in front of everyone and let everyone know that we’re here,” Third Legged Brewing employee Dillan Davis said.
Forsberg said that the festival didn’t prioritize new businesses when selecting vendors, but that she was excited to have the opportunity to feature them.
“We typically do reach out to our previous vendors first,” she said. “But then we open it up. We reached out to Three Legged Brewing this year because they’re new, and we’re so excited to have them.”
Forsberg said that planning for the annual festival takes around 10 months, and that the coordinators of the festival begin planning “little details,” like the dates for the upcoming year, in October.
In addition to being the president of Lindenfest, Forsberg also serves as the festival’s entertainment coordinator. Much of the festival’s entertainment schedule was centered around live music, and included Sparks Fly, a Taylor Swift cover band, A Wall of Denial, a Stevie Ray Vaughan cover band, as well as Tim Gleason Band, a country group that recently performed at Country Thunder in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.
“I really liked the bands that we chose this year,” Forsberg said. “There [was] a little something for everyone.”
But the festival’s entertainment wasn’t limited to music: Lindenfest also had a juggler, face painting, a dance party and a visit from Stella the Sloth, which offered attendees an opportunity to take a photo with the sloth.
Lindenfest also brought back its cutest pet contest. Attendees to the festival could vote for their choice for cutest pet by donating money to a bucket with the pet’s picture on it. All of the proceeds from the contest went to Canines 4 Comfort, a non-profit organization based out of Round Lake that provides trained dogs to support mental health treatment.