If you drove down Kellogg Avenue on the afternoon of July 29 and hit a wall of fire trucks, you already know something big is happening at the old Coney Island site. A fire broke out around 2 p.m. at the Farmer Music Center construction site, close enough to the road that Anderson Township and Cincinnati fire crews both responded and Kellogg Avenue briefly shut down. Messer Construction, the general contractor building the venue, said uninstalled roofing material caught fire, though other outlets reported welding sparks as the likely cause. No one was hurt, the structure itself wasn't touched, and crews were back on site building the next morning.
That fire is a small story. What it points to is a bigger one, and it's one most people in Anderson Township have half wrong.
The assumption I keep hearing around the neighborhood is that Farmer Music Center is replacing Riverbend, the way a new stadium replaces an old one. It isn't. What's actually happening on that stretch of riverfront is closer to a merger than a teardown, and it changes what a summer night on Kellogg Avenue is going to look like for years to come.
What's Actually Being Built
The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and its subsidiary, Music & Event Management Inc. (MEMI), bought the shuttered Coney Island and Sunlite Pool property after the park closed for good following Nights of Lights at the end of 2023. What's rising there now is a 20,000-capacity outdoor amphitheater with 8,000 reserved seats and a 12,000-person synthetic-grass lawn, wrapped in more than 300,000 square feet of concourse and club space. Twenty-five full-service bars and concession stands are spread across three levels, along with four separate premium club spaces, including ones already named Stageside and Riverside, plus two levels of box suites.
The project carries a $160 million price tag, funded in part by a $60 million naming gift from the Farmer Family Foundation and $8 million from the state of Ohio, which is how a park that generations of Cincinnatians knew as Coney Island ends up with a name most residents are still getting used to.
The design detail that actually matters for anyone who's sat on Riverbend's lawn during a sold-out show: MEMI says the farthest lawn seat at Farmer Music Center will sit 25 feet closer to the stage than the farthest seat at Riverbend. That's not a marketing number. It's the whole point of the vertical, stadium-style seating bowl the architects are using instead of Riverbend's sloped hillside, and it's the reason the new venue can hold roughly the same crowd as its neighbor in a smaller footprint.
Why Riverbend Isn't Closing
Here's the part that surprises people. MEMI has said plainly that Riverbend isn't being torn down. The plan is to refurbish it and keep it running alongside both PNC Pavilion and the new Farmer Music Center, stitching all three into a single festival-ready complex on the same stretch of riverfront.
"There aren't very many festivals in the country that have three pavilions with permanent seats and roofs, concession stands, and restrooms," MEMI CEO Michael Smith said of the plan.
That's a different neighborhood story than "the old venue is gone, the new one takes over." It's three fixed-seat venues sitting within walking distance of each other, built by the same operator, sized for exactly the kind of multi-day festival booking that a single amphitheater can't host on its own. Moonlite Gardens, the older event space on the Coney Island grounds, is also still standing next door, with talk of a possible renovation down the line.
For a resident, the practical read is this: whatever traffic and parking patterns you've built your Riverbend summers around aren't being replaced. They're being added to.
The Two Venues, Side by Side
| Riverbend Music Center | Farmer Music Center | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | 1984 | Spring 2027 (planned) |
| Capacity | About 20,500 | Up to 20,000 |
| Reserved seating | Covered pavilion | 8,000 seats |
| Lawn capacity | General admission hillside | 12,000, synthetic turf |
| Concourse/club space | N/A | 300,000+ sq ft, four premium clubs |
| Location | 6295 Kellogg Avenue | Adjacent, former Coney Island site |
Riverbend was designed by architect Michael Graves and has anchored Cincinnati's outdoor concert scene since 1984, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra putting its own season count at roughly 35 major contemporary shows a year. This past summer alone brought Muse, The Strokes, Jason Aldean, Rod Stewart, and Wu-Tang Clan through the gates, a lineup that filled the calendar from late June through late September. None of that changes because Farmer Music Center exists. If anything, it's the reason MEMI is confident there's demand for two amphitheaters on one road.
What Changed in the Timeline
When Coney Island's sale was first announced in late 2023, the early word was that the replacement venue would open by spring of 2026. That date has since moved. Public updates from CSO and MEMI throughout 2026, including a January renderings reveal and a May construction walkthrough, have consistently pointed to a spring 2027 opening instead. If you've been going off the original 2026 timeline, it's worth updating what you're expecting to see finished by next summer. The site will still be an active construction zone through this concert season and into next year's.
The Quiet Part of the Story: Summerfair Came Back
Not everything happening on the old Coney Island grounds is about the amphitheater. Summerfair, the long-running fine arts and crafts festival that used to call Coney Island home, returned to the site this year, setting up in the Grove area of the property this past spring. It has no formal tie to MEMI or the CSO. It's simply proof that not every piece of that land is being absorbed into the new venue, and that some of the older rhythms of the site are finding their way back even while cranes work next door.
That matters if you've been assuming the entire property is now off-limits to anything but concertgoers. It isn't. The corridor is holding onto more of its old identity than the construction fencing suggests.
What This Means for Your Kellogg Avenue Summer
Put it together and the picture for Anderson Township residents looks like this. Riverbend keeps running its own packed season, unaffected by construction next door. Farmer Music Center adds a second, larger-capacity venue to the same half-mile of riverfront, with an opening now set for spring 2027 rather than the date most people originally heard. MEMI is deliberately building toward a three-venue festival complex, which means the traffic and parking crunch on show nights isn't a temporary side effect of construction. It's the new normal the operator is designing for.
If you're driving Kellogg Avenue on a concert night between now and spring 2027, expect construction fencing, occasional lane closures like the one after the July fire, and eventually two amphitheaters running on overlapping schedules instead of one. MEMI's broader roster, which already includes The Andrew J Brady Music Center downtown, the ICON Festival Stage at Smale Park, the Taft Theatre, and Stuart & Mimi Rose Music Center at The Heights, gives some sense of how comfortable this operator is running several venues at once. Kellogg Avenue is about to become the biggest cluster of them.
For anyone who's lived through a Riverbend show-night backup on Kellogg, the honest advice is to build in extra time on nights when both venues could be running events, and to keep an eye on Farmer Music Center's own construction updates as the 2027 date gets closer.
Anderson Township has spent years positioning Kellogg Avenue as an entertainment corridor, and this is what that investment actually looks like when it's under construction rather than on a planning document. It's noisier, it's more crowded on peak nights, and it's also becoming something the region hasn't had before: three fixed, roofed, riverside venues capable of hosting the kind of multi-day festival booking that used to require flying to a bigger market.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near the corridor, whether you're watching from a porch on Sutton Road or wondering how a new venue might affect a property you're thinking about selling nearby, that's a conversation worth having with someone who knows this stretch of the township block by block. Ragan McKinney works this part of Southern Ohio and east Cincinnati every day, and we're always glad to talk through what's changing in your specific corner of it. Let's Connect.
