HOLLYWOOD — The barricades went up east of Western Avenue a little after seven Saturday morning, and by noon the smell of grilling pork and toasted chilies was doing the work no banner could, pulling people off the sidewalk and into the middle of the Boulevard.
The Thai Town Summer Festival returned this weekend for its eleventh year, closing four blocks of Hollywood Boulevard between Western and Normandie for two days of food stalls, boxing demonstrations, classical dance and the slow shuffle of a crowd that filled the asphalt curb to curb. Organizers with the East Hollywood Thai Association estimated turnout above twenty thousand across Saturday and Sunday, up from what they logged last year, though they concede the count is a guess made from the roof of a parked truck.
“You cannot really count a street this full. You count the trash bags at the end and you work backward,” said Sunan Kittikorn, 58, who has chaired the festival committee for six years and spent most of Saturday in a folding chair near the Normandie barricade with a radio and a clipboard.
The food is the reason most people come, and the vendors know it. Forty-one stalls ran this year, a mix of the Thai Town restaurants that operate the rest of the year within a block of the closure and a handful of home cooks who sell only at the festival. Aran Prasert, 34, who runs a noodle counter on the Boulevard, said the two festival days can equal a strong ordinary week. “I prep for a month and sleep in November,” he said, plating boat noodles two at a time.
Getting the street closed is its own annual project. The association applies months ahead for the permits, hires private security, and coordinates with the city on bus rerouting along the corridor, where two lines detour south for the weekend. Councilmember Alicia Rendón, whose district includes Thai Town, walked the festival Saturday afternoon and said the closure had grown smoother each year as organizers learned the paperwork. “The first years, half my job was untangling permits at the last minute,” she said. “Now they hand me a plan and I mostly stay out of the way.”
Not every block welcomes the crowd. A dry cleaner just outside the barricades said Saturday walk-in business vanishes when the parking does, and a resident on Kingsley Drive complained the amplified music from the main stage ran past the ten o’clock cutoff both nights. Kittikorn said the committee would review the sound log, as it does every year, and adjust the stage placement if the readings backed the complaint.
By Sunday evening the stalls were folding their canopies and the street-services crews were staging at the Western end, waiting for the last diners to clear. The barricades came down before midnight, the Boulevard reopened to traffic, and by Monday the only sign left was a faint grease shadow on the asphalt where the pork stall had stood.