For 40 years, the Gilroy Garlic Festival was a Bay Area tradition, making one small farming community world famous. But it all came to a halt in 2019 when a gunman opened fire on the crowd. Now, six years later, the event is back up and running.

It was one of the most popular and unlikely events anyone could imagine: a celebration of a plant with such a strong smell that it was known as the "stinking rose."

"Prior to 1979, garlic was sort of in the closet, right?  And it wasn't until we started having a garlic festival that garlic came out of the closet and became a mainstream, very popular ingredient used for cooking," said Greg Bozzo, a former festival president.

Over the years, the Gilroy Garlic Festival didn't just promote a pungent vegetable; it put the city on the map.  At its height, 80,000 people attended the three-day event until 2019 when a lone gunman entered the grounds and began shooting people with an assault rifle.  He was killed in less than a minute, but three festival goers, including two children, died and 17 others were wounded.  The resulting lawsuits and insurance hikes shut the celebration down until this weekend.

"This is a staple, right?  Everybody from the Bay Area comes to Gilroy for this festival," said visitor Cheryl Weiland.  "So, when it shut down, everybody was really sad. Now, it's like the first time back in the original venue, and we just had to come."

Actually, it was a brand new venue. The event was taking up one corner of the Gilroy Gardens theme park.  The space can only hold about 3,000 people, roughly one-tenth of the old crowd, but the tickets sold out in about six hours.

"We're definitely going to try to grow it," said current festival president, Paul Nadeau. "This is a first step forward, so after being in kind of hiatus for the last five years, we're really starting to brush off the dust on our boots and making sure that we grow this responsibly."

Organizers said growing the event will probably require another change of location, and they are not ruling out a return to the original venue at Christmas Hill Park.

"What happened there six years ago is something that should never happen to anybody," said Bozzo. "So, as we look forward to future festivals, we want to continue celebrating garlic in this community. But as we move forward, we will never forget the past."

Bozzo's family had been part of the event since its beginning and was on scene when the shooting occurred. He recently was elected mayor on a promise to restore and preserve the festival.  Now, visitors once again feasted on all kinds of garlic-infused foods, from pasta and French fries to unorthodox items like ice cream, kettle corn and even garlic beer.  But Bozzo said it was the people themselves who were changing the fortunes of the festival and the city.

"You have helped us come back," he said, "and instead of being remembered for something bad that happened to us, we will now be known for how we responded to it. And I thank everybody for that."

It's always so much harder to build something than it is to destroy it. The town was shaken by a random act of madness, and it's taking some time to get its feet back under it. But the determination to reclaim their beloved tradition shows that the scent of garlic isn't the only thing that's strong in Gilroy.

• Gilroy