If you ponder how the West Franklin Street corridor can go from looking like a war zone as the West Side Nut Club’s Fall Festival winds down on Saturday night, to a clean, pristine five blocks in less than seven hours, you’d likely conclude it would be chaotic. You’d be half right.
“It’s organized chaos,” laughs Brandon Julian, publicity chairman for the club’s 2025 event — one of the nation’s largest street festivals. When the six-day event ends around 11 o’clock that Saturday night, North American Midway Entertainment workers begin dismantling rides and game booths. At 6 a.m. Sunday, local organizations arrive and begin taking down their food booths, and the streets and Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library West Branch lawn are cleared out by 7 a.m.
That’s when 100-150 of the roughly 300 active Nut Club members assemble at Franklin Street and roll up their sleeves. Julian says 30-35 different committees each are charged with one specific aspect of the festival and get to work on their particular area. Restrooms and ticket booths get addressed first.
Trash pickup doesn’t just occur along the five-block stretch of Franklin Street from Saint Joseph to Wabash avenues, but also in a four-block radius on either side. All of those streets are soaped and power-washed, and storefronts receive similar treatment up to waist high. Crews replace flowers in the Franklin Street median and replant grass on the trampled library lawn.
Club members put back METS bus stops that were temporarily removed for the festival, as well as city trash cans. Crews usually are finished by 1 p.m. Sunday, Julian says, with nary a trace of the aftermath of 200,000-plus festivalgoers. “If you don’t know,” Julian says, “it’s just nuts.”
