Friday and Saturday’s Great GoogaMooga festivities seem to have been considerably more pleasant and better organized than last year’s Prospect Park concert and eating-fest, which suffered from overcrowding, phone service issues, and food, booze, and water shortages. Gothamist’s Lauren Evans happily reported yesterday that wait times for vendor booths were kept to “a few minutes,” supply generally met demand, and Porta Potty lines were short and, remarkably, sometimes non-existent. (The reception was said to be “still spotty, but not hopeless.”) Unfortunately for Sunday ticket-holders, the gray drizzle we woke up to this morning forced the cancellation of today’s GoogaMooga. In addition to “poor weather,” the organizers of the event — which is put on by Superfly (the people responsible for Bonnaroo) and sponsored by the nonprofit Prospect Park Alliance and New York, among many others — cited “safety and prevention of damage to the park grounds” as reasons for calling off the remainder of the festival.
Indeed, a couple days ago, the New York Times’ Michael Powell, who regularly walks his dog in the park, wrote about the mess left by 2012’s GoogaMooga. Foot traffic from 40,000 attendees created “great muddy patches where grass had been” in the park’s Nethermead meadows, which required reseeding that left parts of the area roped off from the usual soccer players and Frisbee-throwers for many weeks. Additionally, Powell wrote that “the principal walking road from the park’s lake up to the Nethermead” was “left broken and cratered, and edged by a 75-yard stretch of mud and dirt.” Though park spokesman Paul Nelson “played down” Powell’s complaints, he also said that Prospect Park Alliance head Emily Lloyd “promised that Superfly would be more environmentally sensitive in its loading and unloading this year.” So, while today’s cancellation was surely a bummer for those who’d planned to attend, it also appears to have been a responsible choice made in the interest of people who’d like to continue enjoying Prospect Park this summer. Also, we’re pretty sure that the wet grass would have caused at least a few people to slip and break something important.
