For a campus that has spent much of its spring quarter navigating a $425 million deficit, a federal funding standoff, and an NCAA Tournament in two sports simultaneously, Saturday's block party on Bruin Plaza offered something straightforward and valuable: a few hours in the sun with nowhere in particular to be.
The event, organized by Ackerman Union programming staff with support from the Associated Students UCLA, drew an estimated 3,000 students over the course of the afternoon. A portable stage on the south end of the plaza hosted a rotation of student bands, solo performers, and a cappella groups, including Awaken, the campus R&B and soul ensemble whose performances have built a following well beyond the a cappella circuit, and a funk trio from the ethnomusicology program who played their second public performance to a crowd considerably larger than their first.
Food trucks from Westwood and the broader Westside lined the perimeter of the plaza, with lines forming early and persisting through the early evening. Several student organizations from Bruin Walk used the gathering as an informal recruitment opportunity, setting up informal tables along the walkways leading to the event and catching students in a mood more receptive to conversation than the average midweek tabling encounter typically allows.
The block party has been a spring-quarter tradition at UCLA for more than two decades, though its scale and production quality have fluctuated with the programming budgets and organizational energy available each year. This year's version was described by several longtime attendees as among the more smoothly run in recent memory, with sound equipment that worked consistently and a schedule that kept the stage occupied without the long gaps that have plagued previous iterations.
"It's a simple thing," said a junior who came with a group from her residence hall and stayed for three hours. "But it's one of those days where campus feels the way you imagined it would before you got here. That's not nothing."
The event took place the same afternoon that UCLA women's basketball was defeating Texas in Phoenix. Students who had watched the first half of the game in a nearby lounge carried the energy of that win into the plaza, which by mid-afternoon had taken on the feel of a celebration for two things at once: the arrival of spring and the Bruins' arrival in the national championship game.