PIFA, spurred by a onetime $10 million grant from the late Leonore Annenberg, ran for three weeks in April, ending with a massive street fair on the Avenue of the Arts that featured a French aerial troupe performing high above Broad and Spruce Streets near the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.
The Kimmel Center was the organizing force behind the festival, which featured commissioned works, unusual collaborations, and the involvement of almost all the large, and many not-so-large, arts organizations in the city and region.
The economic-impact study by Urban Partners, veterans of such analyses in the region, showed that the festival not only had an overall $55 million impact, it generated $4.13 million in tax revenues for the city and state and produced 710 full-time jobs, including 590 in the city.
(Economic activity represents money spent by festival participants and organizers, as well as dollars spent by audiences on restaurants, hotels, and other goods and services. Festival-generated jobs were largely, but not entirely, temporary.)
In three weeks, the festival generated as much economic activity as the highly successful Dali exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2005. Dali generated a little less than $55 million and created about 830 jobs.
The museum's 1996 Cezanne exhibition, which broke institutional attendance records and drew visitors from every state, remains the gold standard of cultural money engines here. Cezanne produced more than $122 million in economic activity for Philadelphia.
