MuncieGras To End In 2018

Next March’s MuncieGras will be the event’s finale act in downtown Muncie.

By then, Muncie Downtown Development Partnership will have held the nod to the New Orleans Mardi Gras tradition for 17 years.  According to officials, attendance at MuncieGras once peaked at 13,000 people.  But in the past few years, it has dropped to about 5,000 a year.

Downtown Development says it will replace the event with a weekend festival in October that will bring back some of the MuncieGras activities and combine them with new things.  Included in the proposed schedule is a music festival called “The Hootenanny” with Southern country rock bands as headliners.

The final MuncieGras will move from Walnut and Charles streets to Canan Commons in 2018.  It is scheduled for March 24.