Weekly summer food truck event brings Greenfielders together all year | The Homepage

A row of food trucks lines up on McCaslin Street behind Magee Pool on May 20 for the return of Food Truck Wednesdays, a weekly summer event launched last year by Greenfielder Addy Lord. Photo by Addy Lord

By Ziggy Edwards

On the overcast evening of May 20, a huge block party took over a section of McCaslin Street behind Magee Rec Center. The section is known by locals as “flat McCaslin.”

Groups of adults supervised toddlers as they played in the closed-off street. Older children rode scooters. About 300 people of all ages came out to mingle and line up for dinner and dessert at seven different food trucks. These included Chi Pop’s Fried Chicken, El Rincón Oaxaqueño, Kilimanjaro Flavour and Page’s Dairy Mart’s brand-new ice cream truck putting in one of its first appearances.

Greenfielder Addy Lord began organizing the weekly event last summer, but this kickoff for the 2026 season was the biggest yet. “I’ve never seen so many people on our street,” she said of the event during a June 8 phone call.

Ms. Lord’s neighbor Patty Epps loved it. Earlier in the day when it rained heavily, she had worried that the weather might discourage turnout.

Ms. Epps described the scene in front of the Page’s truck during a June 12 phone call.

“The line went clear down to the rec center on the next block. They ran out of everything except ice cream sandwiches,” she said.

A wildly successful experiment

It started in 2024 with a birthday party. Ms. Lord hired Ash & Kris Kitchen to cater it with their food truck. In addition to the partygoers, a couple of neighbors stopped by and ordered food.

“This was November,” Ms. Lord said. “Cold, rainy, gross. A Tuesday with no advance notice that a food truck would be there. But two neighbors were interested.” She started to wonder if people would come out for a regular food truck event.

She floated the idea on a neighborhood listserv and got positive feedback. She lined up one food truck each week for Wednesdays in June, July, and August of 2025.

Ms. Lord had already planned to extend the season this year to include the weeks of Memorial Day and Labor Day. After discovering she had mistakenly bought an extra week, she decided to start the food truck events even earlier.

Fellow Greenfielder Will Reynolds had been developing an idea for a food truck festival in Greenfield, but he hadn’t worked out the details of when and where to host it. Ms. Lord suggested “flat McCaslin,” and together they planned the May 20 extravaganza.

“Last year, all the trucks did extremely well,” Ms. Lord said. When she contacted them about this season, they signed up quickly.

“Most of the trucks that come are immigrant-owned and small businesses. So I want to make sure they do good business — and they do,” she added.

But what makes Ms. Lord happiest is the sense of community. “People know they will have neighbors nearby to hang out with even if the food truck isn’t your thing.”

‘Everybody chats and says hello’

Ms. Epps agrees. Her favorite thing about the food trucks is seeing everybody getting together.

“Especially in the beginning [of the season], I see people I haven’t seen since the winter,” she said, adding that she loves seeing how much the kids have grown.

When the events first started, she told two of her friends about the food trucks. They began a weekly custom of meeting there for dinner.

“At the end, I said, ‘I think we should continue.’ And we have ever since.”

This past winter, the three friends took their Wednesday-night dinners inside to nearby restaurants. Ms. Epps told me they haven’t skipped a week yet; even while she went on vacation, the dinners continued without her.

“Addy loves this story, too,” she added.

“Patty is actually the one who started me going,” Run resident Ellen Gula told me on June 12. She is my neighbor and a regular attendee of the food truck events. Coincidentally, she is also one of the friends who decided to meet for dinner on Wednesday nights year-round.

“We enjoyed ourselves so much last summer, we just figured we would continue on,” Ms. Gula said. “We were eating our way through Squirrel Hill restaurants.”

Now that food-truck season has come again, Ms. Gula is excited that it continues to expand. She said there is now enough of a crowd to sustain two trucks on a regular basis.

“I think that’s one of the nicest things anyone ever did — a really nice thing Addy did,” she said. “It’s a party atmosphere. I’ve met new people, a lot of younger people. Everybody chats and says hello.”

Ms. Lord was quick to mention all the neighbors who help coordinate, set up and take down the events.

“I’m grateful for the community endeavor it’s become,” she told me. “All of this has been an experiment. Because people show up is what makes it successful.”

“We’re all making it happen together — that’s where the joy comes in,” she said.

Check out this summer’s food truck schedule at tinyurl.com/food-truck-Wednesdays.

Ziggy Edwards is a citizen journalist who lives in Four Mile Run and proofreads every issue of The Homepage.