Fire up the grill and get yer tailgate on! Construction on Silver Spring’s civic center is squeezing the annual jazz fest out of downtown’s shopping core and into a nearby parking lot.
The festival, which drops in early September, is taking the show to the Lee parking lot, regional director Gary Stith told Silver Spring’s citizens advisory board last Monday. The one-acre swath of concrete sits along Georgia Avenue near Colesville Road, behind a row of small shops, the future Fillmore music venue and the Lee Plaza office building.
The move, Stith said, was necessary because the festival’s traditional setting — downtown’s Turf on Ellsworth Drive at Fenton Street — will become a construction zone this summer. The site will be converted into a hardscape plaza in front of the future Silver Spring civic center.
Once construction on the civic center is completed in 2010, the jazz fest will return to a shiny new Veterans Plaza. It’s unclear where the 2009 jazz festival will be held.
An exact date for the one-day gig hasn’t been announced. Last year’s show featured trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and drew an estimated 20,000 people to downtown Silver Spring.
Penguin reporter Ron Pace contributed to this story.
Lead photo: Baseball fans do a little grilling before a game in St Paul, Minn. Courtesy of Flickr user MNkiteman.
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Are you serious LOL! Why not Jessup Blair Park instead? Let me guess the almighty car.
Maybe Jessup Park isn’t suited to handle that amount of pedestrian traffic. The grounds would be trashed….just look at the mall after July 4th.
Not sayin I agree… but the event also draws a lot of non-downtown residents. Keeping it as close as possible to the metro and downtown, an area that non-downtown-residents are most familiar with, might have been a priority. Personally, I say make the visistors explore south silver spring so they see what’s down there and maybe come back again to frequent the businesses down that way. Just a thought on what the county’s motivation to put on a festival on asphault instead of grass might have been.
I suspect this is a show of good will from the Lee family in hopes of finalizing the Fillmore deal.
An offering to the Gods? Just J/K.
I agree it SHOULD be at Jesup Blair Park for the interim – lots of space, shade, plenty of nearby parking at the college, (they could run a shuttle loop from all the NOAA/public parking) and it is virtually the SAME distance walk from the SS metro – plus the park is sitting right on the #70 bus line and an easy walk from Takoma Metro. What’s not to love?
Have you heard any word on when exactly the turf is going to be torn up & construction will start?
I think the county is still on track to tear up the turf sometime next month (June).
What they do with the turf after that is unclear. A group of artists considered working it into a project. I’ve previously suggested rolling it up and smoking it.
Any suggestions?