Back in 2013 Beers For Good decided that the beneficiary for the proceeds of the brewers festival would be a stage for Riverfront Park. We were tired of spending $1,700 per year on a stage for our Nashua River Brewers Festival each year, and thought that a permanent stage would be a great thing for the city. The Fitchburg Parks Board and the mayor all agreed.
We raised over $12,000 that year, and put it into an account at the Community Foundation dedicated toward a stage. A call was put out to form a stage committee that could direct the project. A number of people from the community heeded that call. David and Robin Streb, Liz Murphy, and Jon Giannetti, former Mayor Mary Whitney, and some Fitchburg State University officials were part of that group. After a few meetings, the committee went dormant and has been dormant for years.
Some money was paid from the stage fund to Haynes, Leineck and Smith Architects for conceptual plans, and some money was paid to a company called River Hydraulics to address the challenges of building a stage in a flood control project area. The hydraulic engineer met with the Building Commissioner and determined that we could, in fact, build a stage in the proposed location. Of course, we didn’t actually try to get any permits, as we only had conceptual plans. This was 2013. And there things languished.
A total of $8,388 remain in the stage fund at this writing, which is now under the control of the Riverfront Parks and Trails Fund Advisory Committee (RPTFAC), a sort of friends group for parks and trails along the river, consisting of representatives from the Mayor’s Office, the Conservation Commission, and the Fitchburg Greenway Committee.
In 2019, there was talk of a new effort to build a Riverfront Park stage. Monica McNamara moved back into town and got a small group together to build a stage at Riverfront park, apparently unaware of previous efforts to build a stage, and of the existence of a fund to do so. She approached the city’s Recreation Department, who happen to be represented on the RPTFAC by its Director, Nate LaRose.
The Recreation Department had discussed holding music festivals for years, and Monica’s interest may have kick-started the “Festivals by the River”, a series of three music festivals with different themes designed to raise money for the stage and other needs of Riverfront Park.
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The first, originally entitled Mardis Gras (but for some reason changed to ‘Folk Festival’ a few weeks before it happened) was presented July 13, 2019. It had three good bands, a professional stage and sound system, and very few people. Beers For Good was asked to sell beer and wine for the event, to generate additional funds for the cause. That didn’t exactly work out due to the lack of customers.
The second music event, A Taste of Steampunk, on August 28, was another good show, featuring pretty cool bands and a bunch of extra stuff like people dancing with fire and people walking around in strange costumes, many or all of whom were being paid to do so! A spectacular failure if you go by the attendees, but a spectacularly good show for those in attendance, especially if you were seated up front and didn’t have to see that there were very few people behind you.
Beers For Good didn’t attend the third event, a Latin festival, as members were out of town and we barely broke even on the first two events. The weather was poor for that third event, and attendance is said to have been even worse than the first two events.
The River Front Parks and Trails Fund Advisory Committee, when approached by the Recreation Department, said that they would front money to help with the deposits necessary for an event of this type. All proceeds, then will go into our fund. The series is said to be a fundraiser to help build a stage at Riverfront Park. Stay tuned, as I need to find out where we are on this. Because, you see, I am the President of the Riverfront Park and Trails Fund Advisory Committee, along with Nate LaRose, Michael O’Hara, and Mary Whitney, and a player to be named later by the Greenway Committee.
Update – I don’t see that any money was taken from the stage account for the poorly attended music festival events, and I’m not sure why.
On July 30, 2020, Tom Skwierawski, the Executive Director of Community Development, contacted Paul Lieneck, the architect who prepared the concept design for the stage in 2013, to provide a price for the preparation of construction design plans. Tom had contacted Nate LaRose, a member of the Riverfront Parks and Trails Fund Advisory Committee, about the availability of funds for that purpose. We did a quick telephone poll and got approval from Mary Whitney, Bill Stanwood, Michael O’Hara and Nate to proceed up to the amount in the Stage Fund. I told Tom that if he authorized Paul to proceed, then we would pay the invoice, as I surmised that the bidding process for the design of a public building may be onerous.
