Nineteen years is a long time for a free festival to keep turning up in the same residential park. WestFest — the Westerleigh Folk Festival — runs in Westerleigh Park on Staten Island this Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and it still costs nothing to walk in.
The details
- Saturday, Sept. 19, 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Westerleigh Park, Staten Island. The organizer’s address is Willard Ave. & Woodbridge Pl., Staten Island, NY 10314.
- Free. No tickets, no registration — the organizer’s ticketing page simply reads “tickets are not on sale.”
- Rain date: Oct. 3, 2026, so a washout doesn’t end the season for it.
- Run by the Community Arts Commission, a nonprofit; the 2026 sponsors listed are Staten Island Arts and Nicotra.
What’s actually there
- Two performance stages, hosting roughly a dozen music groups across the day.
- Food and craft vendors — handcrafted goods, in the organizer’s words.
- Art workshops, pony rides, and children’s activities.
- The stated mission is a free multicultural, multigenerational day of art for the borough, not a branded summer series.
Getting there
- Staten Island Ferry to St. George, then the Staten Island Railway or a local bus toward Westerleigh. This is a real trip from Manhattan or Queens, not a lunch-break stop.
- Bring cash for vendors and plan to stay a few hours; the whole point of the format is wandering between two stages.
The interesting thing about WestFest is the model. Free full-day music festivals in this city are usually bankrolled by a corporate sponsor and programmed around a headline act. This one is a volunteer nonprofit festival that has stayed in the same park for 19 years with no cover charge, funded by borough arts money and local business. That kind of durability is rarer than any lineup.