Tips for Saturday's H Street Festival

I'd like to offer a few tips that might be useful (especially for those of us that live around here) to help you enjoy Saturday's H Street Festival:

1. Plan ahead for travel because the street will pretty much be blocked off all day.


2. No cars can be parked on H Street after 4am. They will tow you. Around 4:30am they will block off intersections. After that you'll see cars on the street, but (unless they are art cars) they will be for vendor set up prior to the Festival. The street will not reopen until 11pm, so plan accordingly.

3. I tend to pretty much spend the whole day at the Festival (12-7pm), so I am always careful to remember sunblock.

4. Bring a water bottle. In recent years DC Water has had a free water station for refilling your bottle.

5. Bring cash. Not everybody takes cards & the ATMs might run out.

6. The H Street Festival is DC's largest neighborhood based festival. In recent years it has drawn in excess of 100,000 visitors each time. I recall that a couple of years ago lots of people had trouble making cell phone calls. I'm not sure if we overloaded the system, but there seemed to be a lot of missed connections. It can also be a little loud sometimes, and this can make it hard to hear your phone wringing. I suggest making advance plans about where to meet friends.

7. The larger crowds meant things got a little congested a couple of years ago, but stretching the Festival all the way down from 4th-14th and H Street (it previously ran from 8th-14th) really helped. I did not find the crowds overwhelming last year.

8. Leashed pets are welcome (there's even a special dog area), but make sure your pet is comfortable around crowds.