Swine Flu: NYC - Popular Cinco De Mayo Festival In Queens Postponed

About 850,000 were expected to attend the festival at Flushing Meadows Park. It's not far from St. Francis Prep, the local epicenter of the swine flu outbreak, and also PS 177 in Flushing, where there are several suspected cases.

While all the entertainment is coming from within the U.S., organizer Carmelo Maceda said: "We cannot control the crowd. We don't know how many people fly in from Mexico or they just went to Mexico. That's why we don't want to take that risk."

City officials said they did not recommend the festival cancel their festivities, but Maceda said they couldn't afford to take a chance.

"We start thinking if something happened in the park as a Mexican community we don't have the power or the money to control a contamination of thousands of thousands of people," Maceda said.

The Cinco de Mayo Festival will be rescheduled in the coming weeks.

Story from WCBS New York