3:00pm | They walk among us. No, not the undead — I’m talking about the people who put on big public events in Long Beach.
Some walk within city government, some outside of it. And they come together to give us parades and concerts, races by car and by foot. Want a farmers’ market, a taste of Long Beach, an artwalk of any sort? Event planners are involved.
One of them, Logan Crow, is speaking out about problems with the process.
“I had to fight for the event,” Crow says of this year’s Zombie Walk, the fourth overall and the first held downtown, “and at the end I felt it was more hindered than helped by the City.”
The first three Long Beach Zombie Walks had been rather simple affairs: zombified people gathered in front of Portfolio Coffeehouse (4th and Junipero) and staggered down 4th Street in search of brains to the Art Theatre to see a midnight screening of Night of the Living Dead or Shaun of the Dead. The first year didn’t even feature any street closures.
But with the event’s exponential growth — “from couple hundred people to 600 to just shy of 3,000 during three years on 4th Street,” Crow told Greater Long Beach — Crow decided to get more ambitious this year and quested (according to his Zombie Walk Website) “to break the record for the largest Zombie Walk in the world.” To that end, he chose to bring the event downtown and conclude it with a concert featuring former members Oingo Boingo at the Historic Press-Telegram building.
Little did he know that he would be subject to a list of demands beyond the ones the City outlined in its special-event application process. “And the additional demands that are put on [you] were so arbitrary, it seemed to me,” he says.
To make his point, Crow discussed with Long Beach Post four of those demands. Two of them, he says, were made by the Long Beach Police Department, whose point of contact for Crow was Sgt. Tom Marcoux. The most straightforward among them was that the Zombie Walk could not take place on Pine Avenue itself because of the number of people anticipated to take part and because there was “too much glass [i.e., windows/walls]” on Pine Avenue — and so the event was placed on the Promenade — puzzling to Crow, because it seemed to him there was just as much glass there.
Part and parcel of this move was that the police require Crow to barricade 5th Street through 7th Street, “which negatively affected the businesses [north of 5th Street] in a major way,” Crow says. “Everything was [required] in the name of security: ‘If you don’t close off 5th through 7th and the Zombie Walk ends, thousands of people will come rolling up Pine Avenue for the Boingo show, you’re going to have mass chaos in the streets.’ And what happened was, a lot of people saw the barricade and thought the street was closed — and they left.”
Another police requirement was that Crow post signage — including on the backs of tickets — that anyone wishing to purchase alcohol might be required to remove his/her zombie makeup. “And what I found out a lot from people is that they saw that, and so they didn’t consider our beer garden as an option,” says Crow, “and [instead] went to the pubs and restaurants,” figuring that those establishments were less likely to enforce such a requirement.
Sgt. Marcoux did not respond to the Long Beach Post requests for comment.
Crow also tells of what he considers dubious demands that came from Special Events by way of Dave Ashman, the department’s bureau manager. One of these was the requirement that no ticket sales for concert be made at the concert venue itself; instead, tickets (aside from those sold online) could be bought only at Ocean Boulevard and Pine Avenue, a full six blocks away. “‘We don’t want you to have a ticket booth near the venue, because it’s going to create gridlock and lines and chaos,'” Crow quotes Ashman as saying. “‘Your ticket booth needs to be [at Pine and Ocean], and only there, and you’ll have to direct people [to the venue] with maps or whatever.’ So essentially what you had is a ticket booth that was six city blocks away from your event, which is unheard of. And what happened was that people showed up at the venue and found they had to go all the way down to Ocean to buy tickets, made their way down there and said, ‘Fuck it, we’re not going back.'”
Ashman confirms that this requirement came from his office, because the area around the concert venue did not have enough room in which all potential concertgoers could queue, and because the venue itself had only a 4,000-person capacity, while Crow had invited “an unlimited number of people. … We saw a potential problem: that you’d get more people in that area than it could hold.”
How was this different than a concert at, say, the Long Beach Arena, where patrons can walk up to the ticket window the night of a show to see if they can purchase tickets, even as sometimes the show will be sold out? “He was personally selling the tickets, and he didn’t have the support of knowing the limits of [venue capacity],” Ashman says. “If you look at the areas that were feeding in to the concert venue at the P-T parking lot, if there’s more than the venue could handle, there’s not the ability to house all those people, to physically have space for them to sell the tickets, to be screened to go into the parking-lot area, to have the functions that go with concert production. There wasn’t enough physical space to do all those things. The fact [is] that the way he advertised it on his Website was, ‘Come one, come all’; he didn’t say, ‘You have to get your tickets in advance,’ he didn’t say any of those qualifiers, so we had to put some kind of system in place to make sure that we could get the tickets to people who wanted them, and we could inform the people who couldn’t get tickets that it was sold out. Unfortunately, he didn’t have an overwhelming demand; he didn’t sell out his venue. That’s very unfortunate. But we were prepared to help move crowds where they needed to be. The ability to put up signage, the ability to put up directional information, it was all within Mr. Crow’s purview. I reminded him several times about putting up additional signage to inform people what’s going on. Those are things he has to do as the operator.”
Ashman also spoke to the requirement for the barricaded off between 5th and 7th Streets, stating this was necessary because otherwise there might be insufficient area safely to contain the potential number of people queuing up for the concert.
A related complaint Crow has was his being required to keep free music going on the Promenade even as the ticketed concert was underway. “The concern was, ‘If the music stops at the Promenade and the Boingo show is the only option, everyone’s going to go there, and it’s going to be a nightmare,'” Crow says. “And so what that essentially did was make me create competition to my ticketed event.”
But the request Crow finds the most dubious was the demand by Special Events that he print up 10,000 fliers advertising the downtown businesses that would be open during Zombie Walk. “It was an expensive and strange requirement,” Crow says. “My hand was forced to have my event be a commercial.”
Fliers advertising downtown businesses which were open during the Zombie Walk event.
Crow says Ashman justified this by saying people needed to know about their post-Zombie Walk options. “I remember saying to him, ‘How un-green do you want to make this event?'” Crow reports. “Because my head was like: that is so much paper.”
Ashman confirms this requirement, saying an identical requirement was made of this year’s Gospel Fest, and that requirements such as these “are things that commonly happen with special events. … We built a plan based on what [Crow] told us. … If you have a concert that only hold 4,000 … that leaves 8,000 outside of the concert wishing they were inside. I wanted to make sure that the guests attending the Zombie Walk had the ability to make good decisions about other opportunities to enjoy themselves here in the downtown area … [that] they find some way to become involved and stay longer in our area, hopefully adding to the positive economic benefit of having this event in the downtown area. And having an additional list of those possibilities for those people was a good idea. … [W]e had to make really good decisions about how [to handle] When you have 8,000 people who can’t do what they came there to do, they’re naturally disappointed. And sometimes they don’t express themselves well. So by giving them other options, we hoped to avoid a negative experience for the people coming to Long Beach to enjoy a good evening of Long Beach hospitality.”
Ashman reports a positive impression of Crow: “Mr. Crow is a really talented marketing guy, and he had a great vision. He’s a really talented young man.”
Not surprisingly, Crow’s feeling about the City vis-à-vis event planning is more ambivalent. “It doesn’t have to be this difficult,” he says. “Permitting is a dirty word in this town, and I don’t think it needs to be.”
Crow reports that many other event producers have gotten in touch with him to let him know that he’s not alone. “At first I was taking it very personally,” he says. “But as more and more people have stepped forward to say, ‘Don’t take it personally — here’s our story,’ it doesn’t make me feel any better.”
He hopes that speaking out about his experience will help to change the culture of event planning in Long Beach. And to that end, he hopes others with similar experience will speak out, too.