Downtown Kalamazoo outdoor entertainment venue eyed for improvements

KALAMAZOO, MI — A downtown park that hosts live music and festivals could be reinvented as part of a new proposal coming from the city.

Arcadia Creek Festival Place, a downtown outdoor venue that has hosted concerts and festivals since it was built in 2004, would undergo improvements as part of a larger city initiative. If the plan for the festival site improvements is finalized, the two canopies would be replaced in the first phase of the work and eventually the stage could be rebuilt at a different location on the site, among other improvements.

The proposed improvements at Arcadia Creek Festival Place are part of the city’s plan to better connect downtown community attractions.

The plan is to create “cool” connections to different downtown attractions, and also enhance those attractions, to encourage walking and biking, helping the city realize the potential of downtown, said Deputy City Manager Rebekah Kik, to MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette.

With the improvements to the festival grounds, Kik says it wants festival-goers to be able to see the interesting connections to other “centers of gravity” downtown. They plan to use lighting improvements, public art and other ideas to make connections between downtown destinations more interesting, he said.

The outdoor festival site improvements, once completed, would immediately help organizers who host concerts and festivals.

“We’re talking about potentially being able to make the area more…