More than double in size, it’s now a two-day event with four stages spread throughout the expanded Mann campus. This weekend, the festival will return after two virtual-only years. And when rapper Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and crew moved to the Mann Center in 2019, it exploded, drawing over 22,000 to the campus of the Fairmount Park venue. Over the course of a decade on that Penn’s Landing blacktop, the Picnic quintupled in size. How big? When the festival created by Philadelphia’s - and the world’s - most beloved hip-hop band debuted at the Festival Pier in 2008, “2,000 people showed up in a parking lot,” Roots manager Shawn Gee remembers.
The Roots Picnic is back, bigger than ever.