Generating Joy Part 1: Wizarding Weekend
- Dec 22, 2025
- 8 min read
by Laurence Clarkberg
This is Part One of a five-part series about the Ithaca Generator to accompany the Generating Joy show at the Cherry Gallery from 1/23/26 to 3/8/26.
It all began in the fall of 2015. It was a few weeks before Halloween and my bike shop intern Gabe Gaydos and I were trying to come up with marketing ideas for Press Bay Alley. Press Bay Alley is a collection of cool little shops located in and around the Journal Building, which is a block west of the Ithaca Commons. My own little bike shop, named Boxy Bikes, was tucked into a former shed that used to hold 10-foot tall rolls of newsprint used to print the Ithaca Journal back in the day when news was ink on paper.
“Why don’t we decorate Press Bay Alley to look like Diagon Alley as described in those very popular Harry Potter books?” I suggested.
“What a coincidence!” exclaimed Gabe. “My brother Aiden had the same idea on our ride to school this morning. Let’s do it!” We immediately set to work telling the other shopkeepers about this idea and brainstorming how to implement it. One of the shopkeepers, Darlene Overbaugh who had the candy shop on the corner, came to us a few days later.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “I posted the Diagon Alley idea as an event on my facebook page and it went viral. Over 10,000 people say that they’re coming to the event!” She let this sink in for a minute.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed. “We thought maybe 200 people at most would come. How are we going to entertain that many people? Maybe we should cancel.”
“No, no let’s go through with it. But we have to get other groups involved as quickly as possible!” She contacted the Downtown Ithaca Alliance and other city groups. I contacted my friends at the Ithaca Generator. Ithaca’s creative community sprang into action. Everyone started work on a wizard or witch costume. Darlene quickly produced bottles of butterbeer to sell. The homeschoolers put together a 15-foot long paper maché dragon. The Nature Center agreed to bring rescued owls to the event. Woodworkers at the Generator set up a wand-making demonstration on the lathe. The city arranged to close off State Street and another group put out checkered tiles for human-sized chess matches. Crafters came from all over upstate New York to sell Harry Potter themed jewelry, laser-cut coasters, wands, brooms and 3D printed chotzkes. Regional news reporters as far away as Albany and Buffalo picked up the story and whipped up interest in the event into a frenzy.
I thought hard about how to incorporate my electric cargo bike business into the festivities. I realized that an electric cargo bike would make the perfect flying broomstick for quiddich matches: the driver of the bike could focus on steering while a Chaser on the back of the bike could focus on throwing the Quaffle or catching the Snitch. I recruited four teams from four local high school groups: LACS would play as Gryffindor, IHS would play as Slytherin (with my daughter Thea as their captain), New Roots would play as Hufflepuff, and the homeschoolers would play as Ravenclaw.
The weekend of the event finally arrived and the number of people who came overwhelmed the small town of Ithaca. Hotels were sold out. Restaurants ran out of food. The line for butterbeer in front of Darlene’s candy shop wrapped around the block. We were afraid people would be bored and disappointed but the opposite was true. People waiting in line enjoyed showing off their costumes and talking with other fans about their favorite Harry Potter characters. People loved it!
After the event city officials realized that the event had brought in several millions of dollars in revenue. They were eager to repeat this success and for several more years Darlene continued to organize the event. However, Universal Studios, which owns the Harry Potter franchise, sent a cease-and-desist letter and threatened law suits that effectively killed the event.
[Special bonus material: here is a description of Wizarding Weekend that I wrote a day after the event!]
Wizarding Weekend Origin Story
11/1/15
by Laurence Clarkberg, Boxy Bikes
I lot of reporters have been asking me who came up with the idea for Wizarding Weekend and who organized it. I had the idea and John Guttridge and Darlynne Overbaugh were the main organizers. Three weeks ago we began planning a simple Halloween event, expecting less than 200 attendees. When we hosted the event yesterday, estimates were that between 8,000 and 15,000 people came.
In retrospect it’s a pretty amazing story. It’s a testament to Press Bay Alley’s creativity and Ithaca’s ability to rise to the occasion. It’s a story about the lightning strike of the Internet going viral. That lightning strike is completely unpredictable and a bit scary. But it’s also awesome and a great opportunity as we saw yesterday. How can other retail spaces similarly attract and harness an internet lightning strike like this? It’s hard to say, but one thing is certain: if a retail space is local, connected, and creative they can be ready to roll with it.
It all started with my email to the rest of the Press Bay Alley shopkeepers on October 10th: “The other day my employee Gabe and I were noting the many similarities between Press Bay Alley and ‘Diagon Alley’ of Harry Potter fame...This year Halloween falls on a Saturday so this could be a good opportunity for someone to host some activities during the day.” Over a week later on October 19th I sent a second email, which included “My friend Claire says that we can get graduation gowns [for wizard costumes] very inexpensively at the thrift shop so let me know if you want to get in on that.”
On October 20th Darlynne took up the Diagon Alley idea. I was busy organizing Wool Day, another Press Bay Alley event (which we felt was pretty successful with a hundred or so attendees). So Darlynne posted the Wizarding Weekend event on facebook. Darlynne felt that with some effort we might be able to manage the following schedule, which in retrospect is laughably simple:
(Everyone in costume - Alley Decorated)
11am Story Hour and Craft Time
1pm-2pm Quidditch Match?
2pm-3pm something in the circus space? (Amy, maybe juggling?)
Trick or Treat from 12-6:30pm (early because the little ones have a hard time going out at night)
On the morning of Thursday, October 22 our landlord John Guttridge wrote to us “So, um, so far 1800 people have indicated that they are coming to our Halloween event...” Amuse shopkeeper Kristina Thelen replied “DUDES!! I am so scared!! I am afraid folks are going to expect SUPER awesome....I am so not going to be able to deliver that in a short amount of time...” She signed her email “Kristina *freaked out* Thelen”. Darlynne responded with confidence: “I’m totally on this situation, this is a GOOD thing for the alley.”
Later that day John sent us an email with the subject line, simply, “Um, this happened.” It was Ithaca Voice reporter’s Jolene Almendarez’s article “2,400 Harry Potter Fans to Transform Ithaca Street Into Diagon Alley.” Jolene expressed great enthusiasm, well beyond the usual dry disassociated writing of a reporter covering a simple Halloween event:
“I look forward to seeing my fellow Harry Potter fanatics dressed in their wizarding finest...Because who doesn't remember how they felt the first time they saw or read about Diagon Alley? Who doesn't remember the childlike feeling of thinking that there could be something magical in the world that could save us from being 'perfectly normal', thank you very much...”
It was personal for her. Here we were thinking of our event as just a bit of fun for our Ithacan friends and family, but Jolene saw it as “the defining story of a generation”. Her short article was almost giddy with excitement. This fanaticism is beyond my own understanding. Over and over again during our Wizarding Weekend I saw 20-somethings give Harry Potterdom an almost religious reverence. The facebook visitor count continued to rise by about 500 a day. I told people that our Wizarding Weekend was going to be the Woodstock of the millennial generation.
By Thursday evening John wrote to us “I am mildly worried about how much space we will have considering how many people are coming (it is over 2700 now...) but think it will probably be great.” The next day he walked around his property and determined that at most 1500 people could stand on it at once. Clearly this event was going to extend beyond his own boundaries. He swung into action. He contacted the Downtown Ithaca Alliance, the mayor, the food trucks, photographers, magicians, Convention & Visitors Bureau, the Cornell Raptors program, and many other Ithaca organizations who might be able to participate. John is good at making things happen. He has a lot of connections to the City and to other entrepreneurs. It was a joy to see him take this on with gusto.
For my part I focussed on organizing the Cargo Bike Quidditch match. One of my best moves ever was to hire photographer Allison Usavage. Her photos of my General Manager Gabe Gaydos and his brother Aidan biking up and down Press Bay Alley in full Quidditch garb fanned the flames of internet interest. Within about four days I invented the game of Cargo Bike Quidditch, organized a homeschooler team and teams from each of the three main high schools in Ithaca, designed a logo, and had t-shirts printed.
There is another important part to this story: Ithaca Generator. The importance of Press Bay Alley having a makerspace in its midst cannot be underestimated. In addition to giving us shopkeepers access to tools, the makerspace is the wild side of the Alley, keeping it real. Many readers may not even know what a makerspace is. It is an international movement of underground (literally underground in our case) community workshops. It is also a wellspring of innovation. Generator members kind of do their own thing. No one is in charge. You never really know what’s going to happen next but whatever it is, it’s invariably cool. Every time I passed through the space last week I saw more and more cool things coming together. My General Manager Gabe making some amazing signs for all the shops on the laser cutter. Alexy creating a wall of animated portraits. Jeremy setting up some lathes to do wand-making. Mark shouting spells at voice-recognition software on his computer. And when I passed through the makerspace on Friday morning I was greeted by an eight-foot long dragon head that a group of home-schoolers had just assembled out of chicken wire and paper mache the night before.
This Wizarding Weekend event proves that Press Bay Alley is a special place that deserves to be held up as an example. I can’t see a mall doing what we did here. Mall employees don’t have incentive to do much beyond what they are told. Mall business don’t have connections to local farms and craftspeople, their allegiance is to a corporate headquarters beyond the horizon. Their marketing is in the margins of our facebook pages, not in the center.
And the rest is history. Between 8,000 and 15,000 people came to Ithaca yesterday and enjoyed our hard work and creativity. That’s a lot of people considering that the population of Ithaca is 30,000. In just over a week we had put together an event that rivals other major Ithaca events. Thanks everyone and see you next year!
Coming up next: Generating Joy Part 2: Covid Heroes.
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