The Just Believe Festival and What LOVE Park Is For

Late August in Center City still carries real heat by four in the afternoon, and John F. Kennedy Plaza was full of it. Sun bounced off the LOVE sculpture’s red, green and purple paint, a bass line rolled out from somewhere past the fountain, and a crowd had gathered that had clearly not shown up by accident. I’m Harry Hayman, and I was cutting through LOVE Park with no plan beyond getting from one meeting to the next. Philadelphia, as it tends to do more often than most cities are willing to admit, had other ideas. A runway ran across the plaza stones. Vendors had tables set up along the edge. A stage stood under a floral arch, and someone up there was reading names off certificates while the crowd below held up their phones to catch it. I did not know what any of it was called yet. I stayed anyway, and by the time I left I had a name for it: the Just Believe Festival.

What the Just Believe Festival Turned Out to Be

The festival is now in its sixth year, and it belongs to GoBelieve Culture, a Philadelphia nonprofit that runs the Just Believe Festival every last Saturday of the month from April through August, at LOVE Park, free to anyone who shows up. Four dates were printed on a sign near the stage when I arrived: April 25th, May 30th, July 25th and August 29th. I had wandered into the last one of the summer without knowing there were three before it. The format holds steady across every date. A runway for emerging designers to show new work. Live sets from local musicians. Vendor tables with food and small businesses. This year the festival added something new, an Art Battle, painters working in real time while the crowd watches a piece take shape instead of only the finished canvas. Creative Philadelphia lists it plainly as family friendly, the kind of Saturday afternoon built around watching people make things rather than watching people sell things, even though there is plenty of selling happening at the edges too.

Aaron Pleasant, who performs and records as Gobbana, started GoBelieve in 2012 with Kahlil Jackson, out of North Philadelphia, around a mission of equal opportunity education for teenagers through music, fashion and technology. He put the festival’s whole design philosophy to Dosage Magazine in nine words: “I just brought my worlds together. Fashion, music, community.” That sentence explains why nobody has to buy a ticket to notice it working, and why the certificates I watched being handed out from the stage, honoring women the organizers called their Aunties of Impact, fit the afternoon exactly as well as the runway did.

The Park That Used to Be a Skate Spot

LOVE Park did not start out looking like a stage for anything. The plaza was designed in 1965 by the architect Vincent Kling, working with the city planner Edmund Bacon, and it was dedicated as John F. Kennedy Plaza two years later, named for a president rather than for the sculpture that would eventually take it over. Robert Indiana’s LOVE arrived in 1976 for the country’s bicentennial, was supposed to leave with the rest of the temporary art installed that year, and stayed because a Philadelphia Art Commission chairman named Fitz Eugene Dixon Jr bought it outright rather than watch it go.

By the 1990s the same flat granite that made LOVE Park a good place for a rally made it one of the most famous skateboarding spots on earth, photographed for magazines, built into a video game and skated for years despite a city ban. Bacon put his own surprise at that turn in plain terms: “Neither Vincent or I had the slightest premonition that our work would become world famous.” In 2002, at ninety two, he skated across the plaza himself to protest the plans to redesign it, which tells you something about how much the space had come to mean beyond what anyone drew on paper. The version I was standing in during the festival is the one that came after all of that. A renovation the Philadelphia Inquirer priced at $26 million, finished in 2018, flattened the skate features, planted lawns and gardens, and rebuilt the fountain with programmable jets and lights. Mayor Jim Kenney cut the ribbon that May. Not everyone loved the redesign. But the park that resulted is exactly the kind of open, walkable green space that can absorb a runway, a stage and a crowd like the one that turned out on August 29th without anybody needing a permit for a tent the size of a building.

A Note From Harry Hayman on Public Squares

I keep ending up in places like this, and it is not an accident anymore. LOVE Park is one of the handful of spots in Philadelphia where absolutely everybody crosses paths on a normal day. Tourists photographing the sculpture. Office workers cutting through on a lunch break. Skaters who still show up even though the park was rebuilt to discourage them. Families heading up the Parkway toward the museums. Most days that crossing is just geography. Somebody has to actually put something there for it to become anything more, and on August 29th somebody had.

I do not think placemaking is complicated, whatever the word has come to sound like in a grant application. Put music where people already walk. Give a few designers a runway they could not otherwise afford. Let a painter work in public instead of in a studio nobody visits. People stop. Some of them spend a few dollars at a vendor table. A few talk to a stranger they would not have talked to anywhere else. The square feels different for an afternoon, and then it goes back to being a square, until the next Saturday somebody claims it again.

What Free Programming Does for a Downtown

LOVE Park is not run by GoBelieve Culture. It belongs to the city and sits inside the footprint the Center City District manages alongside Dilworth Park, Sister Cities Park and a handful of the district’s other public spaces, all of it built on the idea that a downtown survives on how many reasons it gives people to stay past five o’clock. The clearest recent evidence of that idea is Open Streets, the district’s program of car free afternoons in Rittenhouse and Midtown Village, expanding to twenty dates across 2026. Andrew Jacobs, the district’s vice president of planning, told CBS News Philadelphia the goal now is reaching past the weekend crowd toward people who linger downtown after work too. A business owner along the route, Molly Kiriacoulacos of The Ground Rittenhouse, put the effect in plainer terms: “It’s really increased our foot traffic in a good way. It brings more families out.”

The Just Believe Festival runs on a smaller budget and a shorter calendar than Open Streets, four Saturdays instead of twenty, one plaza instead of two neighborhoods, but it is working the same math. A nonprofit with a folding stage and a sound system can do to one block of Center City roughly what a much larger civic program does across several, provided somebody is willing to show up every month and do it again.

The Nonprofit Behind the Runway

GoBelieve Culture is registered as a nonprofit, listed on Charity Navigator under its own tax filing, and that matters more than it sounds like it should. A festival that exists as somebody’s side hustle tends to disappear the year the side hustle stops paying. A nonprofit with a board and a filing requirement tends to survive a bad year, and GoBelieve has now survived six of them on the same plaza every summer.

The festival is one program among several. Pleasant also writes and directs Karma 101, a touring stage play built around the pressure college students feel to finish what they started, performed on campuses around the region. The line between a play about finishing college and a festival about finishing a design collection or a set of songs is not subtle, and it should not be. Both are built around the same bet, that showing teenagers and young adults the actual unglamorous middle of making something is worth more than showing them only the finished product on a stage.

The Next Last Saturday

By six thirty the light over the towers behind City Hall had gone the color it only goes for about twenty minutes in late August, and the crew was folding the runway carpet while a DJ played out the last set to whoever was still standing around. Two women I did not know were comparing photos from the certificate ceremony, laughing at one where somebody’s eyes were closed. A kid was chasing the fountain jets in shoes that were already soaked through, and nobody was telling him to stop. The sign by the stage still carried a code pointing back to GoBelieve’s site for next season’s dates, none of which exist yet. I did not RSVP for August 29th. I do not think anyone checked.