Organizers of the First Fridays on First Street festival series in Wright City said their inaugural event on May 7 was more successful than they ever could have hoped for.

“We are ecstatic,” said Ramiz Hakim, a city alderman and one of the chief event organizers. “It was much more than we could have anticipated. We certainly exceeded our own expectations.”

The First Fridays event series is planned as a free event on the first Friday of each month to bring vendors and visitors to downtown Wright City. Hakim estimates the inaugural festival last week brought about 80 vendors and around 2,000 people to First Street.

Food vendors, crafters, community groups, hispanic dancers and even an animal shelter with adoptable puppies all contributed to the festive atmosphere of the event, with music playing on outdoor speakers as families browsed the booths. A bounce house and obstacle course were available for kids to play.

“Our vendors were extremely delighted with not only the outpouring of support for the festival as a whole, but also for the individual vendors that were there,” Hakim commented. “We’ve had vendors tell us that they’ve been at festivals that were two or three days, and were four to five times larger than ours, but they made more money at our event.”

And next month’s event on June 4 is going to be even better, Hakim promised. Organizers are taking feedback from this event to make improvements, such as a platform where there can be performances or live music.

The First Fridays festivals are organized by the recently formed Wright City Downtown Revitalization Committee. The group’s goal is to draw attention to the downtown area and encourage positive experiences there, and eventually to begin fundraising for downtown revitalization projects.

Kim Arbuthnot, president of the Wright City Chamber of Commerce and a member of the revitalization committee, said seeing all those people come downtown to enjoy themselves gave her hope for the future of the area.

“We have a lot of vacant buildings down there. Our hope is that people see the potential and say ‘Oh, we could put a little coffee shop there, or we could put a little boutique there,” Arbuthnot explained.

She described having a moment when she and another volunteer finished setting up booths and took some time to see just how many vendors and people had come.

“We said, ‘Oh my gosh, look at all these people, and it’s only 5:30!’” she recalled. “By 7 p.m., it was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with people talking, laughing, and enjoying themselves.”

Although the festival series is free this year for vendors and visitors alike, Arbuthnot said the revitalization committee would like to begin using it as a fundraising event in future years. Proceeds would be used as matching funds for grant money aimed at improving and beautifying the downtown area, she said.

Arbuthnot added that organizers are grateful to all of the volunteers who helped with the event, including a group of local students who came to help set up and were great at keeping things organized.

Correction: Text that was incorrectly included in a previous version of this story has been removed and replaced with the correct text. We apologize for the error and any confusion that resulted.