Walk the Manhan Rail Trail toward the mills this month and you'll hit something new: chain-link fencing where the bandshell used to face the water, a contractor's pickup parked on the grass knoll, and hand-lettered signs steering dog walkers around the closed half of Millside Park. For a park that has carried Easthampton's Friday nights for years, the quiet is its own kind of announcement.
It isn't a park closing for good. It's a project that has been twenty years in the making finally showing up on schedule, and the way the city's fall traditions responded to it says more about Easthampton's actual social map than any single event listing could.
The Twenty-Year Wait Finally Broke Ground
Easthampton had a skatepark once. The David MacDonald Memorial Skatepark, built by a group of friends between 1997 and 2004 after MacDonald's death in a car crash, was dismantled in 2006 and donated to Chesterfield. Residents pushed to bring one back starting in 2019, and the effort finally cleared its last hurdle this month, when the Easthampton Skatepark Committee raised the final money needed for a new all-wheels park on the same grass knoll next to the Millside bandshell, a site the Parks and Recreation Commission approved back in September 2024.
The funding stack tells you how long this took to assemble: a $425,000 state Parkland Acquisitions and Renovations for Communities grant, $250,000 from the city's Community Preservation Act fund, and roughly $88,000 raised privately by the committee this summer, pushing the roughly $750,000 project over the line. Construction is expected to run through the fall and winter, with the state grant requiring substantial completion by June 30, 2027, and an opening penciled for spring of that year.
"As a former skater, it gives me such pleasure to finally see this project move forward," said Mayor Salem Derby.
That single fenced-off knoll is the reason three separate fall traditions had to make a decision this year about where to go instead. Two of them made very different choices.
Why the Concerts Moved Two Miles, Not Zero
The easiest call was Arts in the Park, the free Friday evening concert series that normally fills the Millside bandshell all summer. With the bandshell's neighboring lawn turned into a construction site, the city moved the whole series to Nonotuck Park's Daley Field, running Fridays at 6:30pm starting July 10. It's the most obvious kind of substitution there is: one city-owned park standing in for another, same permitting, same picnic-blanket crowd, just a different patch of grass.
The Maker's Market Made a Different Choice
The Fall Maker's Market usually sets up at Millside too, but this year it didn't move to another park. It moved to Abandoned Building Brewery, a taproom sitting in the Pleasant Street Mills complex between the Keystone, Paragon, and Mill 180 buildings and the bike path.
That's a meaningfully different kind of relocation. A city event leaving public parkland for a private business's grounds isn't the obvious swap that sending concertgoers to Nonotuck was. It works because Abandoned Building Brewery already runs its own calendar of gathering-sized programming, the kind that has quietly built the same audience habit a park event needs:
- Food Truck Friday, a recurring evening with rotating trucks and live sets from local acts including Moon Hollow, The Berkshires, TJ & The Peepers, and The Giant's Harp
- Weekly Thursday trivia in the Living Room taproom
- A Sunday comedy open mic
- The 4th Annual Western Mass Comedy Championship, held there on September 18
A brewery hosting a maker's market isn't just a fallback location. It's a sign that the mill district has built enough of its own foot traffic that it can absorb a marquee civic event without borrowing a park's crowd to do it.
The Traditions That Never Left Nonotuck
Not everything on the fall calendar is displaced. The Harvest Festival, set for October 10 with a rain date of October 11, is listed at Nonotuck Park's Daley Field, at Williston Avenue and Lownds Avenue, which is simply where it has always been held. Millside's closure didn't touch it, because it was never there to begin with. That's worth sitting with: Nonotuck was already doing the job of the city's backup civic ground long before Millside needed a substitute.
The Rag Shag Parade is the same story. Now in its 45th year, running since 1981, the Halloween parade starts at 6:30pm at the old Maple Street School and ends at the Easthampton High School parking lot, a route that has nothing to do with Millside Park and hasn't changed because of it.
Here's how the fall lineup shakes out this year against its usual footprint:
| Event | Usual location | 2026 location | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arts in the Park concerts | Millside Park bandshell | Nonotuck Park, Daley Field | Fridays from July 10, 6:30pm |
| Fall Maker's Market | Millside Park | Abandoned Building Brewery | Fall 2026 |
| Harvest Festival | Nonotuck Park, Daley Field | Nonotuck Park, Daley Field | Oct 10, rain date Oct 11 |
| Rag Shag Parade | Maple Street School to Easthampton High | Maple Street School to Easthampton High | Oct 31, 6:30pm start |
What Happens When the Fence Comes Down
The skatepark project isn't just adding a place to ride. According to the committee's own account of its plans, the addition opens the door to other improvements at Millside once it's built: an ADA-accessible playground to replace the current one, added power and a movie screen at the bandshell, lighting along the walkway, and a resurfaced basketball court. If those follow-on upgrades land alongside the skatepark's spring 2027 opening, next summer's concerts could come back to a better bandshell than the one they left.
Whether the Fall Maker's Market returns to Millside once it reopens, or stays at Abandoned Building Brewery, is the more interesting question. If it comes back to the park, this year's move was purely about construction. If it stays at the brewery, that tells you the market's audience found a home it prefers.
Either way, the fencing that went up this September is the first real change to Millside Park's footprint since the bandshell went in, and it's worth tracking what comes out from behind it over the next nine months.
Lauren Niles tracks these kinds of shifts block by block across Easthampton and the rest of the Pioneer Valley, the sort of on-the-ground read that never shows up on a listing sheet. Schedule a Personal Consultation with Lauren Niles to talk through what a changing corner of town might mean for your own address.
