More About Crowds in a Small Town

I am always struck by how small Santa Fe is -- the population is 88,000, with no suburbs around it. It doesn't come up on lists of cities in the U.S. unless you go way down the list or search for towns with less than 100,000. Even then, it's not near the top.

So it's alarming to read that the end of summer festival staged each year at a local park drew 71,000 attendees last year. That's 81% of the total population of the town crammed into Ft. Marcy park to watch Zozobra burn.

Ft. Marcy Park just north of the Plaza

Of course it's not all townsfolk. Tourists make up a lot of the crowd. But 71,000 people in a park rated for 50,000 max for fire safety is, um, not safe. Especially if a 50 foot tall marionette is set on fire.

I've posted about the event before: each year a huge marionette is stuffed with scraps of paper that people have written their problems and woes on. The effigy's name is Zozobra, Old Man Gloom. Then Zozobra is hauled to the park, stood upright and burned in a blazing show, with everyone's grief and aggravations for the year going up in smoke.

A charming old tradition, started by a few friends 100 years ago when this was a small, unconventional town. But the small town goofy fun became larger and larger and now it is spectacularly out of control.

In a past year

It's too big. This year for safety, ticket sales were limited to 50,000, leaving 21,000 people -- that number itself the size of a small town -- unable to attend the show. Tickets sold out. You used to be able to walk up to the gate at the park and buy a ticket right then and there the night of the burning.

Like the big crowds for Indian Market that I wrote about in August, the charm of Santa Fe -- its small size, narrow streets, oddball customs, old low slung architecture, rustic simplicity -- all of that is becoming overwhelmed by crowds and diluted by spectacle.

Ticket sales are the major fundraiser for the  Kiwanis Club 

It's no different than what is happening to other historic places that people want to visit. Too many people come and, in their coming, change the whole experience. It's a problem of tourism everywhere.

We're not long time locals who remember the small town quirkiness of the old Zozobra tradition -- we're newcomers here. I love talking to my neighbors who grew up in Santa Fe, not just about what Zozobra was like, but what the whole town felt like when you went downtown to the plaza to shop for school shoes, not for $2,500 turquoise rings and $10,000 rugs.

Nothing stays the same, and it shouldn't. But this city is in a moment of acute imbalance -- trying hard to keep its small town charm of odd customs while encouraging the spectacle and excess that growth brings.