After an 18-day run, the Great New York State Fair is over. One of the biggest stories this year was lagging attendance numbers.
On Labor Day, 58,659 people walked through the gates. That brought the total attendance to nearly 800,000 visitors for the entire run of the fair, down significantly from a record-breaking year in 2019 of more than one million.
State Fair Director Troy Waffner says this year was obviously different, but they were able to get through it without any major hiccups. Waffner believes rolling the length of the fair back to 13 days may be beneficial next year. That way, there won’t be competing dates with other county fairs.
Governor Kathy Hochul may weigh in on the idea soon.
Waffner is hoping that next year, we’ll be in a different place in the fight with the COVID-19 pandemic.
New York’s fair wasn’t the only one that struggled.
“When you look at state fairs across the country, the earlier fairs did really well, later fairs are down; the only thing linking them all is the spike in the variant,” Waffner said. “We’re seeing our kid numbers way down, and I have a feeling that parents are making the decision that they want their kids back in school, and they aren’t putting them at risk of getting COVID.”
Now the fair cleanup will begin. That process begins this morning with the tearing down of the butter sculpture. Eight hundred pounds of butter will be turned into biofuel.
There’s a total of 360 acres and many buildings that need to be cleaned. Waffner says within a week, it will look like normal again, as promoters have events on the fairgrounds as soon as next week.
“Everything will be off the grounds — all the tents and everything — by Friday. We’ll have crews work throughout the night and for the next several days to get everything cleaned up. We’ll bring in several dumpsters to get rid of everything. But within a week, it’ll look like the fair,” said Waffner.
State Fair officials will now start to turn their attention to 2022, hoping to reverse sagging attendance numbers.
