Square Roots ran July 10 to 12 on Lincoln Avenue between Montrose and Wilson — Friday five to ten, Saturday noon to ten, Sunday noon to nine, with a Kids Zone both weekend afternoons. Music, craft beer, family-friendly, $10 suggested donation.

On paper that is the most generic street festival description in this entire package. The reason it is not generic is in the production credit: Square Roots is co-produced by the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Why the Credit Changes Everything

The Old Town School is not a venue that happens to teach lessons. It is a music school with an institutional commitment to global and traditional forms, a faculty of working musicians from a wide range of traditions, and decades of relationships with players most promoters have never heard of.

Hand that organisation the booking for a street festival and you get a card built around global music rather than around whichever local bands have the best mailing lists. That is why the programming here is consistently better than the fee suggests, and why it is worth travelling for in a way that most $10 neighbourhood fests are not.

It is the same principle that makes West Fest the best-booked house street fest in Chicago — that one is programmed by the Empty Bottle, which also produced Warm Love Cool Dreams at the Salt Shed. In both cases a real music institution took over a chamber-of-commerce event and the bookings improved immediately.

The lesson for every other street fest in this city is sitting right there and almost nobody has taken it.

Family-Friendly Is Not an Insult

The Kids Zone deserves defending, because "best family street fest" reads as a consolation prize and should not. A festival that programmes for children is making a structural choice about who the neighbourhood is for, and it is a harder choice than it looks — family programming costs money, takes space, and brings in an audience that spends less on beer.

Lincoln Square does this well generally. It is a neighbourhood with a German commercial identity, an excellent independent bookshop culture, and the Old Town School’s Maurer Hall a short walk from where these stages go up. The the published calendars and the festival site carry the programme and the market listing.

Craft beer, a closed stretch of Lincoln Avenue, a children’s area, and a bill assembled by a folk school that knows exactly what it is doing. It is the least fashionable festival in this package and one of the two or three best-programmed.

Cover image: Via lincolnsquare.org