Festi-Fall 2026!

Normandy Village hosted its first Festi-Fall celebration Sunday, Nov. 8, at 1100 N. Beech St. in Normal. The festival, which ran from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., featured pumpkin painting, wood-fired pizza, live music and more. Hundreds of people attended.

Illinois State University Alumnus Dylan Hile-Broad and his mother coordinated the event.

“It is a celebration of community and fall, working with lots of our community partners here. Arrow and Hook Farms, doing the pizza and the pumpkin bars. Really just sort of getting the word out about things like this that are going to be happening at Normandy Village. We were certainly not planning on this being the last one,” Hile-Broad said.

Overall, Hile-Broad expressed excitement and gratitude for the event.

“We’re very happy with the turnout, with the weather. The weather has been excellent. And definitely just a huge thank you to all of all of the people who have shown up, both the people who are working the booths and the people who are eating the pizza,” Hile-Broad said.

Katherine McCarthy, the neighborhood liaison for Strong Towns Blono, hosted a booth at the event and taught attendees about the organization’s purpose.

“Strong Towns is an international organization, and there are lots of chapters in the United States, and we are one local chapter in Illinois. There’s one in Champaign; there’s one in Chicago; there’s a couple others. But anyway, we try to build community and improve basically everybody’s life in Bloomington by bottom-up solutions; so, doing small projects that can build on each other. For example, the point of the murals was to try to make pedestrians more visible by having bright murals and slowing down cars so that there’s fewer accidents and all that,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy also discussed other ways the organization has worked to help the community.

“And we’ve done some other things called charrettes about kind of visioning ideas for how to use and revitalize the urban landscapes. So, in Bloomington, for example, there’s a lot of empty buildings, there’s a lot of parking lots, so we’ve had three different charrettes, which are like workshops to vision what could be done with this property,” McCarthy said.

Illinois State University Graduate student Meghan Niemi, who is majoring in sociocultural anthropology, said she was unfamiliar with the event but decided to attend.

“I didn’t know that this was a thing at all, but coming here, we really liked it. We liked all the different tents and the trivia for the History Museum,” Niemi said.

Niemi enjoyed several booths at the event.

“My favorite tent would be the History Museum, and I don’t know the name of this one, but the pumpkins with the flower painting, that one was super cool. And we really love the portrait, too,” Niemi said.

Niemi believes that more people should attend the event in the future.

“I definitely think more people should come. I didn’t know anything about it, but once being here, I definitely think this should be more broadcast, and the area should know about it,” Niemi said.

With hundreds of people attending the inaugural event, organizers hope to make Festi-Fall a recurring community celebration. Hile-Broad said the turnout has encouraged them to continue the event in the future.

“This is the first time it has happened, but considering the turnout, we’re definitely going to go in for seconds,” Hile-Broad said.