Tomorrow night, Lower Merion’s National Night Out (NNO) returns — and for the first time in years, it’s not in Wynnewood.
This year’s Lower Merion Edition of the celebration runs Tuesday, Aug. 4, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Suburban Square in Ardmore. It’s free and open to everyone. Expect live music, food vendors, carnival rides and games, roving entertainment, and safety exhibits from local nonprofits and businesses. Lower Merion Police, local fire companies, and Narberth Ambulance will be on hand — and so will Wynnewood’s Matt Peskin, who started the whole thing in 1984 and is still very much running the show, or perhaps to put it more accurately, the shows.
From a porch light to a parking lot
The first National Night Out, in 1984, wasn’t an event you’d recognize today. There was no stage, no food, no rides — just an idea Peskin brought out of his years volunteering with the Lower Merion Community Watch: turn your porch light on, walk outside, and stand with your neighbors for one night. [1984 newsclip goes here.] That first year, roughly 2.5 million people in 400 communities across 23 states did exactly that.
It stayed that simple for four years. Then, in 1988, Lower Merion’s celebration moved off the porches entirely — into a parking lot at what was then the GSB building, with the first rides ever attached to a National Night Out. That’s the moment the event we know now — carnival games, live music, a stage — actually began. Everything since has been scale, not a change in kind: the celebration eventually made its way to Suburban Square, and now, after a stretch of years back in Wynnewood, it’s returning there again this year.
From 400 towns to 15,000
What started in Lower Merion didn’t stay local for long. That first year, 1984, drew about 2.5 million people across 400 communities in 23 states. Four decades later, National Night Out is observed in more than 15,000 communities in all 50 states, with tens of millions of people taking part every August — one of the most widely replicated civic events in the country.
Not everyone's a fan
National Night Out has picked up a harder edge of criticism nationally in recent years. Critics have labeled National Night Out and events like it “copaganda”: community festivals, they argue, that let police departments buy goodwill with funnel cake and face painting instead of addressing the substance of policing itself.
Earlier this year, that sort of criticism about NNO was the least of Peskins concnerns. He had a real problem to solve. Peskin didn’t learn until as late as March that the Wynnewood Shopping Center wouldn’t be available this year, which meant finding Lower Merion’s National Night Out a new home with only a few months to do it. Suburban Square is where that search landed — not a statement, just the venue that worked.
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