This post appears courtesy of New Market Wilm, who features a new blog about Downtown Wilmington each and every Wednesday! View the original post here.
The people who brought music to Humble Park, aren’t ones to brag… but maybe they should, just a little.
If you take a stroll down Market on a Friday night, you might hear some “bangin’” live music coming from just down the street. That’s the “Keep It Cool” music, art and comedy series, taking place just one block off Market at 4th Street. We went last Friday to see local bands The Collingwood and Gamma Wolf, while the event’s founder, David Sanchez of Spaceboy Clothing, talked to us about why this humble place was one of the places to be in Wilmington right now.
“I keep thinking that Wilmington needs more random things to do. The kinds of things that make a city a ‘city’. Passing by that park over the years, I had the idea to clean it up and see what we could do with it. I ended up renaming it ‘Humble Park’. It used to be called Delcastle Plaza. The name just kind of stuck. You know, maybe it’s in a weird part of town, maybe it’s a random place where people don’t even know where it is, but it’s one of those places where there are all types and no one is better than anyone else. That’s where the name came from.”
“And I realized that sculpture is a perfect backdrop for a stage. It’s called PROA, by an artist named Ric Snead. It’s shaped like a sail and the sound just bounces off of it and projects toward the buildings. You can be anywhere in the little park and the music sounds awesome. The artist, Ric, he lives in Ohio now. We’ve been talking on a regular basis. And he likes what I’m doing. He and I are actually pretty good friends now.”
“I’ve teamed up with Downtown Visions. They’re doing all the technical mumbo jumbo, and I book all the bands. Brandon Vincent Jackson gets the comedians. I’m a rock musician, with a punk rock background, so I wanted to do something a little more loud, a little more edgy, and get those bands that you see at the Oddity Bar and 1984 and bring them downtown. So far it’s been going well. This next show, with Gozer, Eye Bawl and The Bad Larrys, I think it’s going to be big.”