Upper Harbor Amphitheater Breaks Ground; Loring Park Hosts a Free Concert

City, state and community leaders, joined by First Avenue and the Minnesota Orchestra, broke ground May 4 on the Community Performing Arts Center, an outdoor amphitheater on the north Minneapolis riverfront at Upper Harbor, near where Dowling Avenue North meets the Mississippi River. The venue is planned to seat about 8,000 and to open in summer 2027.

The amphitheater will be operated by the Port of Minneapolis, LLC, a joint venture between First Avenue and the Minnesota Orchestra, and is expected to host roughly 50 ticketed events a year. Under a community benefits agreement approved by the city, $3 from every ticket will be reinvested locally through a partnership with the African American Community Development Corporation. The project is expected to create more than 500 construction jobs and to employ more than 250 people once it opens.

The amphitheater is the centerpiece of the long-debated effort to remake the Upper Harbor Terminal, a stretch of riverfront that spent decades as a working barge and shipping yard. Turning it into a regional concert destination took years of community negotiation and repeated rounds of city approvals before crews broke ground this spring.

Closer to home, Loring Park hosts the free Peace in the World concert from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Loring Park Community Center, 1382 Willow St., with J.D. and Fred Steele and the Mill City Singers, the Ukrainian Village Band, Mark Stillman and Colin Monette. The park has served as a civic gathering place since 1883, when it opened as one of the first parks created by the new Minneapolis Park Board. Originally called Central Park, it was renamed in 1890 for Charles M. Loring, the board's first president and a figure often called the father of the city's park system. It now anchors a downtown-edge neighborhood near the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and hosts events from the Twin Cities Pride festival each June to free afternoon concerts like this one.

Upper Harbor sits well outside the lakes neighborhoods, but the amphitheater is a citywide asset whose programming, traffic and place in the city's cultural life will reach far beyond the North Side. It also carries a familiar tension: large public-private venues promise jobs and revenue returned to the surrounding community but raise hard questions about who benefits and who absorbs the crowds and parking. The community benefits agreement was the attempt to answer those questions in advance, and how it plays out will be watched well beyond the riverfront.