For years, there’s been a time-honored practice of securing space for an upcoming event, be it a concert or parade, by placing lawn chairs on a piece of private or public real estate and looping them together with rope. While not unique to Newburyport, it’s a ritual that reflects the Clipper City ethos to a T, many would argue.
Evidence can be seen on High Street during Yankee Homecoming when residents, and perhaps some who live on nearby side streets, place the aforementioned lawn chairs along the main thoroughfare days before festival’s annual parade on Sunday. They then tie them together with rope (probably bought at Kelly’s Hardware near the traffic circle) and go back inside, knowing they have front-row seats for the parade.
The same practice has been taking place in Waterfront Park/Market Landing Park in anticipation of free concerts during Yankee Homecoming, RiverFest concerts (now taking place near Salisbury Beach), and other music shows. In those cases, however, folks not only plant chairs on the grass but spread out large blankets in an effort to throw a party of sorts on prime real estate.
Well before the first guitar lick or the first drum roll, large swaths of park have been reserved this way.
It’s a practice that isn’t without controversy.
For proof, all one has to do is go back in time two years when the city last held the RiverFest concert at Waterfront Park. Organizers and the city warned attendees of the free show that setting up lawn chairs or blankets or any space-saving items before 9 a.m. on the day of the show was not allowed.
Plenty of folks either didn’t hear or heed the numerous warnings and tried to reserve space anyway. That led to the Newburyport Police Department scooping up everything and dumping it near the harbormaster’s building. The response caught many by surprise, resulting in them losing out on their saved spaces and having to hunt for their belongings.
Years earlier, in 2016 and 2018, the city made the same request, asking folks not to leave lawn chairs and such before 9 a.m. on the day of RiverFest.
As reported by The Daily News, both requests were pretty much ignored.
In 2016, more than 200 chairs and blankets were spotted by 3 p.m. Friday the day before. In 2018, the year Barenaked Ladies performed for a massive crowd, there was zero green space available on the day of the show.
More than a day before the show, City Marshal Mark Murray and then-Mayor Donna Holaday toured the park area and noticed loads of rocks holding down wide tarps and blankets. The rocks were removed as a safety precaution but the blankets and such were left alone with Holaday saying she had no intention of moving people who had already set up, according to Daily News reporter Jim Sullivan’s coverage.
“You can’t stop people from coming, no matter how hard you try unless you have security here and we don’t,” Holaday said in 2018. “It is what it is and we just need to have the rocks removed because that is dangerous.”
Fast-forward to 2024 and the Newburyport Police Department has no intention of policing chair setups for the rest of Yankee Homecoming, according to a police official.
When the subject of saving space was broached on The Daily News’ Facebook page on Tuesday, the post received a wide variety of responses.
One resident said her family has been saving space near the same tree since 2011 and followed that up Wednesday morning with a photo of her family enjoying Tuesday’s free concert.
“At least we take ours home every night. Some people leave them all week,” she wrote.
Another person said the practice resulted in him skipping RiverFest shows.
“A lot of people from out of town gave up trying to frequent concerts. Also, a lot of times you would see these tarps that were taking up huge amount of spaces. Nobody ever showed up …” the former concertgoer wrote.
Another poster simply wrote: “Free chairs!”
The whole situation, if one had to distill it into a few words, can be described this way: “It’s complicated.”
To me, it’s not that complicated. Putting chairs on High Street in the green buffer zone outside one’s home isn’t a big deal. And considering folks are responsible for shoveling the sidewalks outside their homes all winter, they definitely have earned it.
But plopping a large blanket and several chairs in Waterfront Park the night before or morning of a free concert is another. I don’t feel comfortable reserving space on public property for a free event. Simply put, it’s not my land. What gives me the right to claim it as my own, at least for several hours? I have a feeling that if someone asked the guy who pens The New York Times’ ethicist column what he thinks, he would say the same thing.