“It’s really just a cool celebration of what we have downtown, and we like to dress it up with some incredible art and some fun events.”
Bill Kirk is the communications director for Downtown Grand Rapids Inc., the World of Winter organizer. The festival is a free series of outdoor events and art installations celebrating the season.
“Some of the installations are just incredible. Pretty large-scale stuff, sound and lights. People can actually interact with the installations.”
The festival runs now through March tenth with events such as walking tours, winter fashion shows, snow yoga, and a silent disco all designed to bring people downtown for outdoor fun.
“For downtown businesses, especially during a typically slow time of year, January and February, we hope this actually helps those businesses.”
Kirk says last year, organizers used a service that tracks cell phone pings downtown and it registered 4.8 million visits during the festival, although they can’t discern how many were actually festival-goers
“Anecdotally we get a lot of great feedback from a lot of our retailers and restaurants that they see increased traffic.”
This year they’ll survey business partners to get a better idea of economic impact. There’s a full list of events at the World of Winter website.
