Local merchants, food vendors, artists and entertainers were featured at the second Squirrel Hill Night Market hosted Saturday by NextGen: Pgh.
The event drew twice as many patrons as the first market, NextGen founder and executive director Alec Rieger said.
Rieger said that around 10,000 people attended the August night market. Early totals for this weekend weren't immediately available.
“I think we kind of hit it out of the park,” he said. “It was much larger than I ever anticipated, this was just a self-financed proof-of-concept… Pittsburgh really crushed it."
He said that his first exposure to a night market was during a stay in Thailand, and brought the concept with him back to Pittsburgh.
“[I] came back to my guest house to take a little nap. I woke up a couple hours later and the entire mile-long stretch of boulevard … had been transformed into this kind of extravaganza,” Rieger said.
Pop-up events like the night market have an integral effect on the urban and economic development of Squirrel Hill, which Rieger called the most socio-economically diverse neighborhood in Pittsburgh.
It boasts a smaller, folksy feel, he said.
“I think to some extent we were actually helped by our lack of budget,” Rieger said. “The fact that it’s not a big corporate event … really added to it.
“In Brooklyn (New York) … people walk around drinking cheap beer because they think it’s cool,” Rieger said. “Pittsburgh has that type of authenticity that other cities just try to cop.”
