Sidewalk Festival
Eliza Howell Park
Detroit
Aug. 2, 2025
Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood got some love on Saturday during Sidewalk Detroit’s Sidewalk Festival, which showed off its newly upgraded Eliza Howell Park. The event – which bills itself as part arts festival, part neighborhood block party – featured a series of art installations, performances, craft workshops and vendors spread throughout the 250-acre park. The festival was started in 2013 by Sidewalk Detroit, an organization that advocates for community spaces and public art. It took place in the city’s Old Redford neighborhood for years then shifted post- pandemic to focus on different areas of the city that had been divested in.
This was both the festival’s and my first time at Eliza Howell Park. I was surprised at how beautiful and almost out-of-place it was, a sprawling nature enclave in the middle of a big city. The park was almost too big, diffusing the festival’s density to make for a peaceful experience with chill activations spread throughout walks through nature.
A focus of the festival was offering site-specific and sustainable art. Most emblematic of that on Saturday was the festival’s “Deck’d Out Runway” activation, a sustainable fashion show on skateboards. At Eliza Howell’s skate park, designers with Fashion Revolution Detroit competed to see who had the best sustainable, functional and creative fashions, modeled by skaters from A Positive Seed, an organization that uses skateboarding to promote mental health. The event drew the biggest crowd I saw at the festival. I was able to catch a short glimpse of the competition and enjoyed watching skateboarders show off their skills, donned in colorful yellow outfits.
The event also had a series of craft workshops, many with a focus on sustainability. Sidewalk Detroit’s Eco-Artist-in-Residence Maya Davis led a rain chain-making workshop. Nearby, visitors could make clay windchimes and air purifiers. I took part in making a community house art installation, decorating a piece of cardboard that was then attached to a small house-shaped structure next to a patchwork of designs by others. Sitting outside in nature coloring and chatting was pretty awesome. If I had had more time, I would have hung out there longer and probably made some wind chimes.
Other highlights included a beautiful, inviting hammock installation and “Whisper and Shout,” which invited people to write down their frustrations on pieces of paper and then shout them into a recording nearby. A notable performer was Shanzell Page, who sang and tapped with a small group of other dancers. I’ll always advocate for more tap dancing.
Shanzell Page and dancers
Performances aside, I enjoyed was Sidewalk Detroit’s interest in community input for the future of the park. The organization had already been investing in Eliza Howell since 2016, putting on community programming, adding signage, maintaining trails and advocating for road repairs, and now they had their eyes on the future. They displayed a series of possibilities that included trails, board walks, dog parks, outdoor classrooms, playground equipment and more, with photos of different options for each. We were each given eight stickers and encouraged to post on the options we were most interested in.
While I enjoyed seeing the different performances and activations spread throughout the park, I think my favorite part of the event was just discovering Eliza Howell Park itself and exploring a neighborhood that was unfamiliar to me. That may be the point. I look forward to what’s happening next at Eliza Howell Park.
