For small business owners, it was the kind of blockbuster weekend that makes the slow season manageable. For Chicagoans packed shoulder-to-shoulder, it was a failure of crowd control with no obvious culprit — maybe city officials, maybe online influencers, but certainly not them — that left Lincoln Avenue feeling as crowded as Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.
The online debate unfolding in the start of the longtime North Side fall festival has attendees and abstainers alike asking the same question: Who is Apple Fest for?
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“It’s ironic that people are bemoaning the crowds when that’s why the event exists,” said Emily Wentz, a festival vendor.
By drawing thousands of potential customers to local businesses, the weekend accomplished exactly what it was intended to do, Wentz said. At the booth for an Albany Park stationery shop, a. favorite design, she sold more than $10,000 worth of greeting cards, far surpassing her boss’ sales at similar neighborhood festivals.
Other vendors, like Emma Lewis, saw a similar payoff. The 40-year-old business owner said the crowds she encountered were overwhelmingly cheerful, with a steady stream of shoppers moving through her booth and helping her break multiple sales records.
“I didn’t hear anyone saying anything negative,” said Lewis, who owns Rare Form, a vintage home goods store in Andersonville. “People were having a great time and were happy to be there.”
But the photos and videos flooding social media tell a different story. Crowds so thick that dogs and young children were carried blocks for fear of being trampled. Lines so long that even a doughnut cost an hour of time. And perhaps worst of all: reaching the end of Apple Fest only to realize there hadn’t been a single apple in sight.
“You couldn’t really walk,” said Annabell Reckmann, a 36-year-old Lakeview resident who attended the event Saturday morning. “We were just in the midst of other people, just being moved by the crowd.”
Festival attendance has grown significantly over the past decade, according to the Lincoln Square Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce, which has organized Apple Fest since the late 1980s. The chamber says the festival has expanded alongside that demand, growing from a single afternoon on the sidewalk to a multi-day event stretching several neighborhood blocks.
That growth meant extending the festival to Sunnyside Avenue and eventually adding Sunday, followed by Friday last year, said Lisa Ripson, a chamber spokesperson. Organizers expanded that footprint again this weekend, which Ripson said made the crowds more manageable, especially on the last day of the event.
Ripson said the chamber does not have attendance estimates for this or previous festivals. She attributed this year’s unusually strong turnout to “beautiful fall weather” and an “unprecedented amount of social media attention,” but did not address complaints from attendees about overcrowding.
“As we begin planning for Apple Fest’s 40th anniversary,” the chamber said, “we’ll continue looking for ways to improve crowd flow and the overall festival experience.”
To Lewis, the festival felt less congested than others she’s worked, including RibFest in North Center, where long lines have blocked customers from reaching her booth altogether. Apple Fest organizers were quick to solicit feedback and make adjustments throughout the weekend, she said, even leaving empty spaces between vendors to give the crowds more breathing room.
Still, Reckmann had a different experience. The first sign the day might not go as planned, she said, came from inside Lincoln Square’s Western Brown Line station.
“The stop was so packed that you could not even get down the escalators,” said Reckmann, who moved from Germany in March. “We took the emergency stairs.”
By the time she and her friends reached the front of the line at their first Apple Fest vendor, an employee said they were sold out of coffee. It was 10:30 a.m.
That experience was hardly unique, said Alex Saddler, who runs multiple popular social media accounts called Gatekeep Chicago. His videos satirically discourage people from moving to the city by exaggerating its drawbacks, which on Saturday resulted in a slowed-down, colorless, point-of-view video of one of his followers trudging through Lincoln Square.
Days later, the video has garnered thousands of likes, shares and comments, Saddler said, pointing to a broader frustration among attendees who found the festival too crowded to enjoy.
He blamed much of the turnout on influencers who promoted Apple Fest online, drawing people from across the city to a neighborhood that could not accommodate them.
“It used to be a very local fest for the people that lived in that neighborhood,” said Saddler, 29, who lives in River North. “People that have been going for years felt like they were excluded from the experience of what it used to be.”
Locals have felt the effects as Apple Fest draws visitors from farther beyond the neighborhood, said former Lincoln Square resident Erin Nitz. During last year’s festival, she said a visitor from the suburbs swung open his car door into her passing vehicle, totaling it on the spot. Neighbors know how tight the streets can be, she said, while visitors often don’t.
Nitz moved away from Lincoln Square in 2020, but remembers taking her children to Apple Fest “back when it was just a couple of hay bales.” The festival was a fall tradition for her family, one they returned to until around 2023, when the crowds became too large.
“It was super overwhelming, and the kids didn’t have fun,” said Nitz, who now lives in Old Town. “Which is kind of a bummer because it used to be nice and quaint.”
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She has always been happy to share Apple Fest with the rest of the city, she said, but thinks organizers need to reconsider how the festival handles its growing attendance. In the meantime, her family will stick to the Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce’s annual Spooktacular, a less-crowded fall-themed event closer to home.
“I’m totally content never to go back,” she said.