The Great GoogaMooga will not be coming back to Prospect Park

After a second consecutive year that was more shitshow than good vibes all around, people were wondering whether the Great GoogaMooga would show up in Prospect Park again next summer. And now we have our answer: nope. The answer comes courtesy of A Walk In The Park’s Geoffrey Croft, who attended a City Council hearing on the future of private events at public parks in the city, where a Parks Department official shared the news that Superfly was looking to hold the food fest in another location.

This is probably for the best. In the spirit of “You can’t get fooled again,” it was gonna be awfully tough for Superfly to sell people on a third GoogaMooga after two straight festivals became synonymous with “logistical nightmare.” Despite this year’s improved system to get food, the lasting image of the festival ended up being people standing in line in the rain as organizers determined whether or not to open the gates, while at the same time sending out tweets and emails for people to come on down because there were plenty of tickets.

Well, either that will be the lasting image, or the park looking absolutely devastated after all the equipment was packed up and brought home. GoogaMooga ultimately became a symbol of the wrong way to use public parks, of a particularly Bloomberg-ian answer to the problem of park funding, where you’d just collect a small fee to close off huge chunks of it, turning a public resource into a temporarily private one.

Since the organizers are looking for another place to hold the event, we won’t call this the end of the Great GoogaMooga forever, but it is at the very least, the end of it as we’ve known it, however briefly.

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