Watch City Steampunk Festival

Waltham, MA

Centered on Waltham’s beautiful Common at the corner of Main and Moody Streets, the Watch City Steampunk Festival is the great outdoor festival of the Steampunk genre—a cultural and social movement melding elements of Victorian-era history and fashion with retro-futuristic technology.

Watch City 2015 will featuring a broad array of theatrical and musical performers as well as clothing, jewelry, art, and food vendors. The Festival is will also include kids programming, making this most definitely a family friendly event, as well.

Ask a Steampunk: How Did the Watch City Steampunk Festival Get Started?

May 01, 2023  /  Melissa Honig

In 2010, the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation suffered flood damage after the Charles River overflowed its banks. A fundraiser was held inside the museum, and the theme of the party was “steampunk”, which fit well with the Museum’s mission and style. They thought a few hundred people would show up, but they got over a thousand! The Museum realized that they had something special here.

In 2011 the festival moved outside for the first time. In 2012, the name Watch City Steampunk Festival was finally attached to this party. After the 2013 event, a new director for the Museum was named, and the decision was made to drop the Festival. However, another local civic group, the Downtown Waltham Partnership, took over the Festival and revived it in 2015. Since then, the event has been run as a free community festival; even during the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, when we couldn’t have a live event, some virtual entertainments were made available online.

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