One festival had big-time corporate sponsors, sleek, multimillion-dollar racing yachts and 200,000 people who attended from Pennsylvania and Virginia and even from overseas. The other festival -- "fest," actually -- had a brand-spanking-new Walgreens drugstore, skateboards costing upward of $100 and perhaps 7,000 people from as far as, well, Dundalk.
In the love-hate relationship between Baltimore, city of neighborhoods, and Baltimore, city of the world-famous Inner Harbor, yesterday was a beautiful day for a little friendly competition in the serious business of fun.
Pessimists saw a conspiracy in the fact that the Baltimore Waterfront Festival was set to finish its four-day run on the same day as the Highlandtown Fun Fest. Optimists saw the harbor boom as promise that the prosperity that drifted east to Canton might now, finally, be squeezed north into Highlandtown.
But those few who made the trek from festival to festival, from the eastern to the western end of Eastern Avenue, could not help comparing them.
"The Highlandtown festival is a lot better, let's face it," said Highlandtown resident Charles Siebert, 38, a truck driver and collector of exotic animals, who showed off his pet iguana at the neighborhood fair before heading to the harbor to allow the larger crowds to ogle his boa constrictor, named Millennium. "In Highlandtown, everybody I see, I know. It's my territory."
But Siebert did not think the harbor throngs who pressed around to see Millennium were doing any harm to struggling Eastern Avenue.
"Bring on the tourists," declared Siebert, an exotic in the environs of the Light Street Pavilion in his leather, tattoos and Harley-Davidson T-shirt. "Spend your money in Baltimore. Maybe a little bit will trickle down to Highlandtown."
The Waterfront Festival, it's true, had the Key West-Baltimore sailing race, with some of the world's top racers showing off their craft in the harbor after crossing the finish line in front of the Rusty Scupper restaurant. It had Volvo and Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. and Chevy Chase Bank as sponsors, each with a crew of clean-cut organizers toting cell phones to help out.
But for those with only an ocean of pavement outside their doors, the Fun Fest had a skateboard competition with its sponsor, the Charm City Skateboard Shop. Three wooden ramps and all kinds of benches and platforms were placed on blocked-off Grundy Street for several dozen mostly teen-age competitors.
