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‘Everything was packed’ during BLINK 2022

The Toy Heritage mural on Court Street appears animated thanks to tricks of the light.
Bill Rinehart
/
WVXU
The Toy Heritage mural on Court Street had technical issues on Thursday and Friday nights but was working for the rest of the 2022 festival.

The executive director of BLINK says he's pretty pleased with how the weekend went. Justin Brookhart says he heard from some business owners and from police there were more people than in the first two BLINK festivals, but he's waiting for official crowd size estimates.

“Saturday night was probably the busiest night we’ve ever seen for a BLINK,” he says. “There’s a lot of reasons for that: I think the crowds were ready. We had our Toy Heritage mural projection that had some issues earlier in the week finally got fired up. Court Street was going crazy for that. Everything else from Hanna Playground down to The Banks, the drone shows, everything was just totally packed.”

Brookhart says there were some problems with way-finding. He says those are the kinds of things that any large-scale event is going to face.

He says there were no major public safety issues, and city workers should get a lot of credit for helping to keep things running smoothly.

Brookhart says he already has some feedback on what worked well. Sunday evening he was at the corner of Fourth and Main watching a work by Wendy Yu, featuring dancers from Elementz.

“What we’ve seen is people really love to see that local-international collaboration. So I’d say we’ll see a lot more of that for us.”

Brookhart says they’ll look for more ways to plug visiting artists into the Cincinnati community.

Bill Rinehart started his radio career as a disc jockey in 1990. In 1994, he made the jump into journalism and has been reporting and delivering news on the radio ever since.