Stewart Park Festival

It started as mere beer talk: What if we got some really good bands to play in the park?

A quarter-century later, it’s been placed among the top 100 of the 3,000 festivals in Ontario and some would say it’s a good deal better than that, since it’s free.

These pages take you back to the beginning, when most of the pictures were black and white. Then the digital camera takes over and the pictures become so evocative they seem to make music themselves. (Hats off especially to photographer David Zimmerly.)

Historian John McKenty brings it all together in a thorough chronology, not just of a festival, but of a traditional town building its interface with the world, and proving again that beer talk rocks.