Big E attendance: ‘It definitely seems like lighter crowds this year,’ mayor says

Not even the mayor of West Springfield knows The Big E’s daily attendance numbers.

For the past several years, the fair has published its record-breaking numbers every day and in 2024, touted its place among the top four largest fairs in North America.

This year? Only fair organizers know how many have entered the gates in the past 13 days, since they’ve stopped releasing attendance numbers.

“What I’ve seen is probably what everyone’s kind of seen and heard — it definitely seems like lighter crowds this year than in the past,” Mayor William Reichelt said on Wednesday, the 13th day of the fair’s annual 17-day run.

Eugene Cassidy, president of The Big E, refused to comment Wednesday and fair organizers have not said why they decided to stop releasing attendance figures.

The West Springfield mayor and city’s police department have relied on The Big E’s website for attendance data every year. The mayor said he’s not concerned about not having the data.

“If I’m going over there, I can judge how busy it is, just by the traffic on Park Street, leaving Town Hall and coming down South Boulevard,” Mayor Reichelt said. He added that “most days haven’t been bad” this year, but in “the past two days, there has been traffic on Park.”

“Specific attendance numbers after the fact doesn’t really do much for us while the fair is happening … [they] don’t really affect how we operate as a community in relation to the fair throughout the 17 days,” Reichelt continued.

“I didn’t really think the attendance numbers were a big deal until this year when The Big E decided they’re not going to release them … but it kind of is what it is,” he said.

He added, “If there’s issues, we’ll address them, if there’s not, then not.”

Reichelt called last year “an anomaly in the sense of how busy it was that middle Saturday,” and said The Big E this year has been a “normal state fair … as it has in the past.”

Vendors at the fair offered their own perspectives on the past 13 days. The manager of food vendor Chompers, located on New England Avenue, said he and concession stands across the fair have seen a large decrease in sales due to this year’s lower traffic.

“Everybody that we’re talking to, all the vendors, it’s 30%, that’s about the average down,” said Val Crescentini.

“It has been very, very slow, a lot less crowds, a lot of people talking about … [how] they can’t believe how open it is, easy to walk around. Everything is more spread out and just not as busy as it was,” Crescentini said.

But other vendors said “pretty much everything is the same.”

“Personally, our sales, our volume is about the same,” said Tonio Viscusi, owner of Angela’s Pizza. He added that foot traffic has been the “same amount of people here” and that a nearby “pinch point” created by the popular Macho Taco stand has been fixed by organizers, given the stand relocation.

And while founder of The Vermont Marshmallow Company, Alexx Shuman, said her stand is “having our best year,” with “every single day” a “record day,” she noted “traffic isn’t awful when entering and leaving the fairgrounds” and it feels like the “right number of people are at the fair, instead of the most people.”

Last year, multiple viral social media videos showed gridlocked crowds across The Big E. MassLive received feedback from more than 100 attendees — many of whom said they felt unsafe due to the crowd sizes.

One person even called 911 from the fairgrounds at 5:11 p.m. on Sept. 21, 2024, fearing for their safety while trapped body-to-body on Commonwealth Avenue by a long pizza vendor line, according to the West Springfield Police Department.

Reichelt attributed much of this year’s improved public safety to specific changes made by organizers in response to last year’s overcrowding concerns.

He said that internally, organizers did recognize the seriousness of the public safety concerns through conversations, which he also said is apparent in this year’s adjustments.

“Last year, we had the overcrowding issues. There were a lot of concerns on everyone’s side, and those were addressed over the course of the eight to 10 months after the [2024] fair, in preparation for this fair,” Reichelt said.

That’s a stark contrast to comments made by Cassidy just days before the 2025 fair began.

Cassidy minimized the public safety concerns and told MassLive that videos posted to social media of large crowds at the fairgrounds were “clickbait” and online “trolling.” He was unaware of last year’s 911 call and said he was “very suspect” if it actually happened.

He did agree that “choke points” exist on the grounds, but continued to diminish the significance and said they occur at every fair in the country.

Reichelt, who declined to comment on Cassidy’s minimization of public safety issues, said the fair has “generally always been responsive to us on the public safety side, saying, ‘Okay, these are trends that are happening nationally …. These are things we’d like to implement that haven’t [been] implemented in the past.’”

That includes switching the Macho Taco stand this year from the busy Commonwealth Avenue to a spot on East Road, Reichelt said, closer to midway rides. Macho Taco’s manager was not available to comment to MassLive, and his fair vendor employees declined to comment.

“The biggest crowding issue last year, from the TikTok video shown on Commonwealth Ave., was the Macho Taco stand being so popular in an already busy street,” Reichelt said.

He added that no blame is placed on the vendors themselves for being a popular stand.

“Being so popular on an already busy street probably wasn’t — and I know it was a last-minute decision on their [the fair organizers’] end — didn’t end up being the best move, but being responsive, listening and moving that, opening the avenue up again, has been good,” he said.

Additionally, hardening gate access points with vehicle barriers and boosting security in key areas come as more additions to the public safety planning that begins each October for the following year’s fair — a process that has evolved over the past decade, according to Reichelt.