"This is your festival!" A celebration of all things Pittsburgh, YinzerFest, kicks off this weekend
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - The City of Pittsburgh is proclaiming Thursday, 'Yinzer Day,' in honor of the start of a new festival called Yinzerfest. It's celebrating all the Steel City offers for four days at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
Doug Mariani is going back to the 70s.
"When you walked around in 1979, you walked on air every day, not just the day that they won the Super Bowl, or the World Series, every day because you're from Pittsburgh," Mariani said.
He wants families to feel that today when they come to his festival this weekend.
"This truly is a Pittsburgh celebration. We're not celebrating me. This isn't my festival. This is your festival," Mariani said.
It's a project two years in the works after a buddy of his texted him saying someone needs to host an event that brings Pittsburgh together.
"It just kind of stuck and I couldn't let it go, and it kept festering and I tried to ignore it, but it kept coming," Mariani said.
The event is a first-of-its-kind festival that both young and old can enjoy, featuring a cooking stage where chefs demonstrate and share their favorite local recipes, like perogies, and music and comedy from well-known local and emerging artists. You can meet local sports legends, along with the Pittsburgh Pirate Parrot, and take a piece of the city home with you from more than 100 vendors.
When it comes to the kiddos, they can check out the fun zone with bouncy houses from Carolyn Brown's company Jumping Jumperoo.
"I love that we come together as one, no matter where we're from. We're all from different areas and I love that we can come together as one and put on such a great event," Brown said.
It was important for her to be a part of an event that's all local, with the hope of spreading that Yinzer pride we had decades ago.
"Bringing the positiveness back that we used to have in the 70s and the 80s of being one Pittsburgh," Brown said.
This is what Mariani wants to do, spark folks to keep bleeding black and gold every day of the year.
"It's inside of us, deep and hard, and we want that raging like a roaring lion through not just the city or the state, but the country," Mariani said. "We want the world to know who we are as Yinzers."
The festival runs Thursday from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., Friday from 12 p.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more details, including the list of performances, click here.
