Why does a town with a 226-acre park old enough to have hosted a sitting president need a new festival at all?
Highland's Backyard BBQ Festival returns to Main Square Park September 24 through 27, and if you've lived here a while, you might assume it's one of those events that's always been on the calendar, the kind that predates most of the houses on your street. It isn't. This is the fifth year the festival has run. Five, not fifty. That gap between how established it feels and how new it actually is says something about where Highland has been spending its attention, and it isn't the park you'd expect.
The Park Everyone Already Knows
Wicker Memorial Park is the town's anchor and has been for a century. President Calvin Coolidge dedicated it in 1927, and Barack Obama gave a campaign speech there in 2008, just days before the election. The park still does the job it was built for: 226 acres, an 18-hole golf course, a splash pad, a dog park, and 3 miles of interwoven trails that connect into the regional Little Calumet River Trail and Erie Lackawanna Trail network. It also runs its own summer concert series, with tribute acts like Fleetwood Gold and Echoes of Pompeii filling out the schedule, plus a monthly Classic Car Cruise Night that's become its own small tradition.
None of that is going anywhere. Wicker Park is still where you take the kids on a Saturday morning, still where you golf before the heat sets in, still where the dog gets its off-leash hour. But if you want to see where Highland has actually been building something new, the golf course isn't where you look.
A Festival That's Younger Than It Feels
The Backyard BBQ Festival runs 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. each day at Main Square Park, hosted by the Highland Council of Community Events. The format is straightforward: a beer garden, food vendors, craft booths, carnival rides, and live music at the Gazebo every night of the run. What's notable isn't the format. It's the lineup, which the town posts itself, night by night, act by act.
| Night | Date | On Stage |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday | Sept. 24 | Mr. Countryman, Nawty |
| Friday | Sept. 25 | John M. featuring Ray Stoll & Friends, Hairbangers Ball |
| Saturday | Sept. 26 | Morning Glories, Dave & Dave |
| Sunday | Sept. 27 | Dirty Buoys, Crossthreads, Jump, closing with AC/DC tribute act BONFIRE |
That's four nights of programming, each with a different feel, for an event that's only been running since roughly 2022. A festival with a five-year history doesn't get that kind of production budget by accident. Somebody decided Main Square Park was worth building a real event around, and that decision lines up with a broader pattern in how Highland has been treating its downtown.
Why This Particular Corner Of Town Got The Investment
For years, Highland's Redevelopment Commission tried and failed to land the town its first craft brewery. Every neighboring town in the region seemed to have one. Highland didn't, until Fuzzyline Brewing Co opened in the former Franco's Sports Bar and Pizzeria space at 2712 Condit Street, right off the Erie Lackawanna Trail, a few blocks from Main Square Park. The brewery, founded by Highland native Al Robertson and Chef Bob Mclellan, now shows up on the town's own Explore Downtown Highland business listing alongside Global Design Midwest, part of a small but growing roster the town is actively promoting as its downtown core.
That listing isn't incidental. Highland's Redevelopment Commission has also published a corridor plan aimed at Indianapolis Boulevard and Kennedy Avenue, built around improving those streets' ability to attract new investment, both public and private. Put the pieces next to each other: a multi-year push to land a brewery, a published gateway corridor strategy, a downtown business page the town maintains and updates, and a festival that didn't exist five years ago now drawing four nights of live music to a park a short walk from all of it. None of that is coincidence. It's what a downtown revitalization effort looks like when it's actually working, measured not in press releases but in foot traffic on a Thursday night in September.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If you've been in Highland for a decade or more, your mental map of the town probably still centers on Wicker Park, and there's no reason to update that. It's still the recreational core, still free or cheap, still the place with the splash pad and the dog run and the golf course with some of the most competitive rates in the region. That hasn't changed and won't.
But the newer social gravity, the stuff that's actually growing rather than simply continuing, sits downtown. Fuzzyline Brewing's patio is dog-friendly and sits directly on the bike trail, making it a natural stop if you're already out walking or riding. Growlers on Highway has been a downtown staple for over a decade, now running weekly Bar Bingo and Karaoke nights on Thursdays alongside its usual game-day crowd. And the Backyard BBQ Festival, four nights of it, is the clearest evidence yet that the town's bet on its downtown corridor is paying off in a way you can actually attend.
For anyone weighing whether Highland still has room to grow, or wondering where the next round of local investment is likely to land, the answer isn't abstract. It's the corner of Ridge Road and Condit Street, where a five-year-old festival now runs on a bigger stage every September than it did the year before.
If you're thinking about where that kind of momentum might show up next, on a specific street or in a specific price range, Favela Real Estate knows Highland block by block, from the Wicker Park side of town to the Main Square corridor. Reach out for a Free Home Valuation and a conversation about what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what the listing photos show.
