Honfest, an annual celebration of vintage Baltimore kitsch, is stirring controversy in Charm City. Central to the festival are the 1950’s style beehive hairdos and kitschy outfits (seen left) donned by festival goers which proponents contend are a good natured send up of the fashions of Baltimore’s recent past. However, critics point out that those rocking these styles are primarily upper middle class residents of the city or, worse yet, suburban commuters whose masquerade could easily be interpreted as a put down on Baltimore’s working class residents with whom the styles were popular. Others point out that with the festival now entering its fourteenth year, the joke is getting a little old.

“To me, it’s used up,” Baltimore filmmaker John Waters told the Baltimore Sun in an article about the controversy. “It’s condescending now. The people that celebrate it are not from it. I feel that in some weird way they’re looking slightly down on it. I only celebrate something I can look up to.” Waters’ entry into the debate has added considerable gravitas to the arguments of the event’s detractors, with much of Honfest’s imagery and style sense being drawn from the director’s Baltimore-set films such as Pink Flamingos, Hairspray and Polyester.

Blogger Bob Chidester, from the website Hampden Heritage which chronicles the gentrification of the Baltimore neighborhood of Hampden where Honfest takes place, relates his views on the issue in a dissertation proposal posted on the site:

“Beginning in the 1980s, area developers began to renovate the old mill buildings as artist studios and offices. The influx of artists, according to Zukin (1995: 23), places a neighborhood squarely on the road to gentrification, and that gentrification has occurred with increasing intensity over the past several years. Housing prices are on the rise as affluent families (often referred to as “yuppies” by longtime residents) move into the area. A merchant’s association, with the aid of a large federal Main Streets grant, has altered the look and character of the city’s main shopping street, installing expensive boutiques, restaurants, and bars, meant to attract visitor consumers from elsewhere. An annual street festival known as “Honfest” purports to be a celebration of working-class women, but can be read alternatively as a minstrel show that lampoons all working class people (Gadsby 2006).”

You can takepart in retaining communities in America’s cities by learning more about the Right to the City alliance. Right to the City is a national anti-gentrification organization which contends that the massive scale gentrification of American cities over the past decade was the result of several decades of massive underfunding of urban areas by the Federal government and states, entities more concerned with the growth of sprawling suburbs. Right to the City is working to restore funding to American cities in order to keep communities intact.

Honfest

June 14, 2008 - 11AM through 10PM &
June 15, 2008 - 12PM through 6PM

On 36th Street (”The Avenue”) between Elm Avenue & Falls Road

Baltimore, MD

LINKS:

Metromix Baltimore: Honfest 2008

Wikipedia: HonFest

Baltimore Sun: Backlash against kitschy Honfest grows