CNY residents celebrate Oktoberfest in downtown Syracuse

This wasn’t Keishil Lopez’s first rodeo.

Hailing from Florida, she grew up attending Gasparilla festivals, never wincing at an opportunity to get dressed up in her pirate gear.

“Now that I live here, I feel like this is probably the equivalent of Gasparilla,” Lopez said. “And if I’m gonna go to the Oktoberfest, why not try and be in costume?”

She was one of the first to arrive in a crowd coordinator Sam Leamy said he hoped could be thousands.

“I always see events in Syracuse, and there wasn’t an Oktoberfest here, so we had to jump on that gap there, ” Leamy said.

This is the first time Wolff’s Biergarten has hosted an Oktoberfest in Syracuse. But it’s safe to say Leamy has ample experience in the sphere. For 16 years, he’s helped coordinate the Albany festival.

“I love putting on big festivals. I have a great core of staff who love like these big festivals and bringing the community together and just having a having a good time,” Leamy said.

Unlike Leamy, he said this was the inaugural Oktoberfest for about 90% of his staff. Of course, sales were at the top of Leamy’s mind, but as important as making a profit was providing a break from the monotony of daily life.

“Syracuse has been a joy, actually. We just want to see smiling faces.”

About halfway through the event, I saw something I’d never seen before that most definitely brought joy to the hundreds present.

A wiener dog race. What a way to entertain.

Reese, a one-year old dog, participated in the race. His spry, young legs couldn’t catapult him to a victory, but he seemed to have a great time doing it.

Originally, Leamy planned to hold a strongman competition in addition to the race, but low signup necessitated the move to new entertainment. They replaced it with a boot-chugging contest and a stein-holding bout.

As you might expect, most of the crowd cheered on the events and live music from Fritz polka band with food and drinks in hand.

People ate homemade pierogis and kielbasa sandwiches from a Polish Roadhouse truck. They also tapped in to 4 different kinds of bratwursts when they needed a break from their Bavarian-style brews.

“We want to have, you know, that German feel, that Bavarian feel, with not only the bratwurst sausages, pretzel sticks, the authentic German beer, but, you know, kind of bring alive the German heritage that’s alive and well all throughout,” Leamy said.

Can confirm, the beer and bratwurst sales had just about every eligible event-goer sipping and munching away. Every bier token was good for a souvenir 33oz liter cup, and Larry North and Innrry Kunes made sure to have a couple.

Unlike Lopez, North and Kunes have attended their fair share of Oktoberfests — and not just in central New York. The two have traveled to 12 states to enjoy the German tradition, including Walpole, Massachusetts, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and abroad in Kitchener, Canada.

“For 20 years, multiple times a year, once a year we do the main fest. So we’ve gone to Walpole, Massachusetts, to Kitchener Canada. We’ve gone to Cape Coral, Florida. And Tulsa, that’s the best one,” Kunes said.

But what keeps them coming back time after time? It was a simple answer North gave with a brilliant smile.

“Good view, good music, good food, good dancing,” North said.

Since they first started going around the turn of the century, the events have become more and more important to North and Kunes. North says his age won’t stop him, and that it’s actually a motivator to find new pursuits of pleasure.

“And as you get older, you need more fun, because the end of the trail is coming up not too far down the road,” North said.

They certainly gave their truest attempts at winning best-dressed. North donned a tracht, or lederhosen, with leather shorts and suspenders, just enough to hide the most unique part of his outfit.

Dangling from his belt, North wore a coin engraved with his grandfather’s birth year, 1895. It was just his way to show respect to his German ancestry and celebrate a rich history of Oktoberfest.

After a successful first fête, Leamy hopes to grow Oktoberfest in Syracuse for years to come.

“People are working really hard to put on this event,” Lopez said. “It gives everyone that relaxed sense of ‘Oh, it’s a festival, it’s a party.'”