City officials have pulled the plugs on Thursday's opening concert of the popular First Thursdays series in Mount Vernon Place because of landscaping concerns - and for future concerts, listeners will have to stay off the grass.
"We were told there were maintenance issues that hadn't been addressed in time for the concert," says Stephen Yasko, station manager of WTMD (89.7 FM), who announced the cancellation Thursday afternoon after failing to reach an agreement with the City of Baltimore Department of Recreation & Parks.
For more than a dozen years, the free First Thursday Concert Series has taken place once a month from May through October. Most performances, which attract up to 3,000 concertgoers, showcase national as well as local talent. The concert series was started by Baltimore's City Paper, but for the past five years, the performances have been sponsored by the radio station.
"Our workers went out and did a site visit," says Michele Speaks, spokeswoman for the city's Department of Recreation & Parks. "The grass was so wet that foot traffic would have reduced everything to mud."
Though the parks department had been notified about five weeks ago that the area needs sod, Speaks said that project was delayed because it was the wrong time of year to do it, then the grass was just too wet for the work.
But Kevin Murphy, lawn and garden manager for Watson's Garden Center in Lutherville, said that the ideal time to lay sod normally is from late March to the end of May.
"You want to do it when it's still cool and before it gets too hot," he says.
WTMD invests about $20,000 in the series each year, with remaining expenses donated by area businesses and by the city.
The event won't be rescheduled. But, station officials were scrambling Thursday afternoon to create what Yasko described as a "virtual concert" by bringing indie pop band Wild Light and the folk/rock duo Matt Duke into the station from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., and creating a live video stream that listeners can download.
"I'm very disappointed," Yasko says, "especially since this was going to be the first concert of the year."
Speaks added that for future concerts in the series - the next one is scheduled for June 4 - the grass in the park will be fenced off, and listeners will sit on the cobblestones in front of the Washington Monument.
"I would suspect that's probably less comfortable than sitting on the grass," she says, "but we don't make decisions like this for no reason. It must have been done for the health of the grass."
Yasko says that alternative isn't ideal, but it's preferable to losing the whole series.
"We do expect the season to continue," he says. "We'll figure out a way to make it work as best we can."
