Slabs of good Ribfest songs help draw throngs

ST. PETERSBURG — The weekend crowds at this year's Ribfest were the largest ever, so large that on Nov. 14, a Saturday, the fire department barred anyone without a ticket already in hand from entering, officials said.

"We shut it down before it got dangerous," said Lt. Joel Granata, a spokesman for St. Petersburg Fire Rescue.

Overall attendance for the event Nov. 13-15 was about 65,000, about the same as last year, said Tom Whiteman of the Northeast Exchange Club, which organized the event. Ribfest raises money for several children's charities.

The difference? Only 6,000 people attended on Friday, Whiteman said, while 30,000 or so attended both Saturday and Sunday.

One reason for the crowds was that bigger, better known groups, such as the Zac Brown Band, which had a No. 1 song on the country charts this summer, played over the weekend, Whiteman said.

"We contracted with him many months ago before he was a hit. We gambled and it worked," Whiteman said. "We know that we crushed all prior records for the weekend."

He said the large crowds caught organizers off guard. Just before George Thorogood and the Destroyers took the main stage at 8:30 p.m. that Saturday, fire officials moved in to limit new arrivals. As a safety precaution, the gates remained closed for the rest of the evening, Granata said.

Granata and park officials said there are no regulations for how many people can be in the park, since it is bordered only by a fence on the south. Generally, the park can safely hold 20,000 to 25,000 people, depending on how stages and lines are arranged, Granata estimated.

Whiteman said the event committee will study ways to make traffic inside the park flow better next year.

Outside the park, there was not a significant increase in parking violations, police records showed. Neighborhood leaders said noise was not a problem this year.

"We did not get any complaints about it," said Maureen Stafford, president of the Historic Old Northeast Neighborhood Association. "We certainly heard it. ... From our perspective, the noise was somewhat mitigated from prior years."

Luis Perez can be reached at lperez@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2271.