To many, it felt like a familiar feeling when Artscape 2024 events were canceled on Friday and Saturday.
“Are we ready to officially just call it the Artscape curse?” one user on the social media platform X asked Saturday around 5 p.m.
It might be starting to feel that way to many Baltimore residents and Artscape-goers, whether it’s rain, excessive heat or a combination of both like this year, when events on Friday and Saturday were canceled due to storms.
This year’s Artscape was supposed to be the first full three-day festival since 2019 after the coronavirus pandemic and 2023’s Saturday programming was canceled when Tropical Storm Ophelia rained out festivities. After being canceled between 2020 and 2022, it’s easy to see why it felt like the event had been cursed.
Artscape, which has almost exclusively occurred in the month of July since 2000, usually experiences some sort of heat- or rain-related weather events.
An analysis of temperature and precipitation data recorded by the National Weather Service from 2000 to 2024 for Artscape weekends showed there have only been five festival weekends when there wasn’t any precipitation recorded and the daily temperature high wasn’t at least 95 degrees.
Of these five years — 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014 — only three experienced all three days being below 90 degrees.
But precipitation recorded does not mean it was during Artscape hours. Since 2000, 14 out of 22 Artscape weekends have had any amount of precipitation recorded in downtown Baltimore, which was as little as 0.06 inches on Saturday and Sunday in 2004. Five Artscapes had at least one day with a half inch of rain or more, two of which were this year and last year.
Excessive heat has never stopped crowds before, like in 2019, when festival-goers braved 100-plus temperatures. In fact, the event, which has almost always taken place in July outside the past two years, has had four weekends during which one of the festival days was the hottest day of the month. Friday’s high temperature in Baltimore was 102, but it won’t be known if that’s the month’s hottest until August is over.
Ten out of 22 Artscape weekends since 2000 have had at least one day when the temperature rose above 95 degrees. Baltimore City’s threshold for calling a Code Red excessive heat warning is a 95-degree heat index, a measurement of what the temperature feels like using humidity and temperature. Some Artscape days might have felt hotter than the apparent temperature, like Saturday’s, which had a peak heat index of 107 degrees in the afternoon.
Seven Artscapes have experienced at least one day when the temperature was at least 95 degrees and any amount of precipitation.