The Westheimer Colony Art Festival began on lower Westheimer Road in Montrose in 1971, when shop owners and residents, among them property owner Jay Hollyfield, staged a community arts and crafts fair to raise money to improve the street. Its success produced the Westheimer Colony Association, which from 1973 put on two small festivals a year and spent the proceeds on esplanade plantings in the surrounding area. Later shortened to the Westheimer Art Festival, it grew into a juried show of local and national artists and gave its proceeds to Houston charities and arts groups.
A looser street fair grew up around the art show and outgrew it. The twice-yearly Westheimer Street Festival, known as WestFest, closed blocks of Westheimer each spring and fall, and the Houston Press reported crowds of more than 200,000 along a mile of the road by 1999. In 1992 the art festival's organizers and the street fair's went to court over the right to charge admission, and by 1993 the art festival had left Montrose for downtown parking lots. It was renamed the Bayou City Art Festival in 1997, when its spring edition moved to Memorial Park.
WestFest's last street edition on Westheimer came in October 1999, after residents' complaints about garbage and parking, and the city refused it a permit in 2000. It spent three years on Allen Parkway before a brief return to Westheimer, and by 2004 it had ended.
Getting there
29.7447, -95.3905
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