CHAPTER 4 - LAYOUT

THE HOLY GRAIL of FAIRE SITES

By far the biggest challenge when laying out a Renaissance Faire is the site you build it on. In 1989 the Renaissance Pleasure Faire lost the ability to hold it’s event in Agoura California at the now preserved Paramount Ranch and was forced to look for a new place to erect their Brigadoon-like village. For months we visited and reviewed potential sites, finally landing in the Glen Helen Regional Park in Devore California, just outside of San Bernardino. By the end of this process we had tried to squeeze the contents of our Faire into every possible location, with the exception of a Walmart parking lot. The truth is, a successful Faire, both aesthetically and financially depend on several specific factors all coming together:

Trees
If you have the luxury of having lots of them then you are already half way to having a fantastic event. Building in a forest allows for shade, ambiance, and potentially a scaffold for your booths and stages to build off of, and around. The alternative is a lot of structures and shade you and your participants are going to have to build yourself. Trees come with it concerns about the conservation of the environment around you, so more care needs to be made when building around them, but the results are definitely worth it.




Parking

If your event is popular you are going to have to have a lot of flat ground adjacent to your Faire for people to park on. This will have to be a place that is easy to get in and out of, from roads convenient to nearby highways and freeways, without creating a nightly traffic nightmare when your event’s guests are stream home after a long day. Parking also needs to be on a surface that won’t immediately turn to mud if unexpected rain appears to dampen your event. Nothing says nightmare like thousands of stuck vehicles. Few forested areas have adjacent blacktop parking lots so more often then not you are parking on a farmer’s field between crops, and applying lots of water to the surface to keep the dust down during the day.





People
Your event needs to be as close as possible to lots of people. The fewer miles they have to drive the more apt they are to come visit your event. The obvious drawback is that the closer you get to populated areas, the fewer natural settings there are to host your event. Ultimately you would love to have your event adjacent to a busy freeway exit, and yet nothing says anachronism like seeing and hearing semi’s driving by your Elizabethan village.




Friendly Neighbors
Although you might not first imagine it, having neighbors that “get” what you are trying to do is key. Not everyone sees Renaissance Faires as wholesome entertainment, and there are those that take a “not in my neighborhood” stance when they hear a promoter is considering land near their homes and towns. During our search for a new Faire site in 1989 we were actually driven out of one perspective community because the local newspaper suggested that the coming Faire would bring with it, “hippies that would feed marijuana to their cows”. It is a rare rural community that easily accepts such an event, and that is exactly the people you want most on your side. Fostering a strong relationship with your surrounding communities, all year round, is vital to the continued success of your event. Ultimately, we want your neighbors to have a sense of ownership in the yearly party, and be willing to fight to keep it, if for any reason unforeseen circumstances threaten its right to be there.