LAFAYETTE, IN — If you went to Target this weekend, you already knew that Purdue University students have begun making their way back to campus.
With the return of Purdue students to Greater Lafayette comes a slew of regularly scheduled events. For the last 20 years, the Starry Night Music and Arts Festival was one of few annual gatherings in the Chauncey Hill area that was within walking distance for students, hosting up-and-coming bands alongside local artists.
But in the late spring of this year, previous vendors were notified that the festival’s two-decade-long run had come to an end.
Nolan Wilhite, co-owner of Flora Candle Company and president of the Downtown Lafayette Business Owners Association, said that news was a gut punch. He had been a vendor for the past few years.
“That was hard from a business owner’s standpoint, because we relied pretty heavily on that event’s annual weekend,” Wilhite said. “Starry Night really set us up for the fall and the holiday season, and it just was something we couldn’t go without.”
In the email to vendors, Rob Schrumpf, Starry Night organizer and pastor of Campus House, pinned the need to retire the annual festival on rising costs associated with hosting the event as well as ongoing construction around the Chauncey Hill area.
Reading that email, Wilhite said he was inspired to find a way for the Starry Night Festival to live on. He ultimately pitched the idea of moving the event to downtown Lafayette.
A new name to match a new city
After gathering support from fellow downtown Lafayette businesses, Wilhite said he set up a meeting with Schrumpf to discuss the possibility of taking over the annual music and arts festival.
Schrumpf said the initial idea behind the Starry Night festival was to thoughtfully and purposefully design a beautiful space that, at least for a few hours, would bring people together with a distinctly artistic blend of incredible music, diverse artisans, interactive creativity and storytelling, excellent food and hospitality, as well as spotlighting various community causes — all under a canopy of lights.
But despite the festival’s continued annual growth, Schrumpf said the costs were becoming too much.
“Post-Covid, the price of the rented stage and sound equipment tripled, the price of bands doubled, and the expanding footprint meant that more of the Starry ‘infrastructure’ of light trees, light strands, hands-on supplies, needed to increase, as well,” Schrumpf said. “Even with sponsorship, the cost of time and resources on Campus House became difficult to sustain.”
Wilhite said Schrumpf was able to share his contacts and guidance on what made the Starry Night event a success each year. But although Schrumpf supported the relocation, Wilhite said Campus House and Schrumpf requested that with the move into downtown Lafayette, roughly one mile from the festival’s original Chauncey Hill location, that the name “Starry Night Music and Arts Festival” be retired also.
“We understood that request,” Wilhite said. “In finding a new name for the festival, we wanted it to come across that this would be the same kind of atmosphere, just not in West Lafayette.”
The new name for the festival Wilhite and fellow DBLOA members settled on was Star City Nights, a hat tip, Wilhite said, to Lafayette’s nickname earned in the 19th century from its reputation for trading and shipping as the “Star City of the West.”
The inaugural downtown Lafayette festival will be on Friday, Sept. 26, from 6 p.m. to midnight.
Wilhite said Starry Nights always held a reputation for being well organized with strong communication to its vendors, a quality he aims to uphold in the new Star City Nights.
And as a former Purdue student, Wilhite said Starry Nights held a strong reputation, too.
“I know the location for Starry Nights was huge, because besides Global Fest, this was really the only other event in West Lafayette,” Wilhite said. “But there was a lot of work that went into making it what it’s been known for, and all of those things were non-negotiables for me when I decided to take this thing on.”
Helping students explore the city they’ll call home
Downtown Lafayette is just a mile away from Chauncey Hill’s center, but for an 18-year-old student away from home for the first time without a car, that’s a long distance from their dorm room.
Wilhite said the challenge of bringing students downtown is one he’d considered, knowing Starry Night’s success was also built on its proximity to campus.
Through a partnership with CityBus, Wilhite said students will be able to catch a free ride from Purdue’s campus to downtown Lafayette, running loops for pick-ups from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Specific locations for pick-ups and drop-offs are still being determined.
“We can’t act like we’re going to get 15,000 people down here with it not being on Purdue’s campus,” Wilhite said. “Our resolution to that is having a free way to get to and from campus.”
Maddi Miller, owner of Salvaged Stories, said her Atlanta-based business has had a presence at the annual West Lafayette festival for the past 15 years, originating with her aunt. Receiving that spring email announcing the end of Starry Night was devestating.
“This festival felt like this thing I could rely on every year, so I was really said about it,” Miller said. “It had become a staple for me.”
But when she heard from Wilhite that the festival will live in on downtown Lafayette, Miller said she was completely on board. Given the new city and new environment, she has hope that the spirit of the festival will continue.
“I always loved that it wasn’t just a focus on vendors selling interesting things; it was creativity and participation in that,” Miller said. “There’s always something to do, whether it was listen to local music or a DIY participation activity. This is the type of event where people get to be a part of something, so they walk away with that ‘something’ even if they didn’t spend any money.”
Those creative aspects will live on in Star City Nights, Wilhite said, with plans for two stages and a “Creative District” just as Starry Nights had. Recently announcing the booking of Vacation Manor, an alternative indie duo, Wilhite said the experience has opened him up to the logistics of booking bigger names and bigger stages.
“The amount of permitting and money that goes into getting these stages is a lot, and it’s something we could not have done without all of our 21 sponsors,” Wilhite said.
The footprint of the festival, Wilhite said, will be along Main Street, stretching between Fifth and Eight streets. Each of the 48 vendors will occupy a single parking spot, offering room between vendors for patrons to comfortably walk around to also visit the downtown businesses.
The selectiveness in choosing vendors to match the theme and price point goods for sale, Wilhite said, was something he learned from Schrumpf and his two decades of organization.
Although the Starry Nights Festival was meant to serve as a “blessing to the city,” Schrumpf said it’s been an honor to work alongside Wilhite and the other annual vendors to encourage the launch of Lafayette’s inaugural Star City Nights.
“We have such a deep appreciation to those who have been part of the story through the years: the supporting partners, the thousands of volunteers, scores of bands and vendors, and the tens of thousands of participants who made Starry Night such a unique and immersive experience,” Schrumpf said. “It’s been a good run.”
Jillian Ellison is a reporter for the Journal & Courier. She can be reached via email at jellison@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: ‘Spending Time’: Starry Nights Music & Arts Fest sees a name change, move to Lafayette
Reporting by Jillian Ellison, Lafayette Journal & Courier / Lafayette Journal & Courier
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