Celebrate Wallingford Event Canceled Due To Coronavirus Pandemic

WALLINGFORD, CT — The town’s popular Celebrate Wallingford event has been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, organizers recently announced. The annual festival had been scheduled to take place over the weekend of Oct. 3 and 4.

Liz Landow, executive director of the Wallingford Center Inc., said that it would have been “impossible” to enforce the regulations that will still be in place due to COVID-19. The event traditionally draws between 15,000 and 20,000 people to downtown Wallingford, according to the Meriden Record-Journal.

“I have had a long conversation with Steve Civitelli, Wallingford Health Director, and he explained how it would be impossible to enforce the regulations that will still be in place to deal with the spread of COVID-19,” Landow said in a news release. “We were so looking forward to it, but the logistics issues were too much to overcome.”

One obstacle was that the need to space restaurant, business, civics and crafter tents sufficiently far enough apart to maintain social distancing between vendors would have considerably reduced the number of available locations, according to the news release.

Organizers said an “even more insurmountable problem was that there was no way to control access to the festival site.” The anticipated coronavirus regulations, such as the requirement to wear masks and maintain a 6-foot social distance between attendees, were seen as “impossible to enforce,” the news release states.

“You can enter Celebrate Wallingford from dozens of locations,” Landow said. “If there is a requirement to check everybody’s temperature as they enter, for instance, such a precaution would be unmanageable. In the end, keeping everyone healthy and safe, which is obviously our top priority, was going to be unachievable, so our only option was to cancel.”

All payments made by vendors to WCI will be returned to them within two weeks.

“As the lockdown progressed over the past two months, we began to see that Celebrate Wallingford might be a casualty of the pandemic,” Landow said. “All checks we received from vendors will be returned to them as soon as possible.”

WCI recently completed a restaurant promotion to encourage people to patronize the takeout options of Wallingford restaurants through a gift card raffle, whose winners are to be announced soon. The organization is planning a second promotion to include hair salons, barber shops and similar service businesses in order to draw people to the town center and its many small businesses.