Two September Festivals At Concord Point, And Why Locals Keep Mixing Them Up

If you have lived in Havre de Grace for more than a season, you already know the drill: a September Saturday, a crowd on Concord Street, live music floating over the water, food smells from Commerce, and someone on Union Avenue asking if this is the one with the fireworks or the one with the lobster rolls.

It is a fair question. The town runs two very different festivals at almost the same address within a few weeks of each other, and from a block away they look like the same event with a rebrand. They are not. One is a ticketed curated tasting that punishes procrastination. The other is a free civic sprawl that rewards wandering. Treating them as one weekend blurs both.

Same Park, Two Different Products

The Susquehanna Wine & Seafood Fest and the City's Waterfront Festival share the Concord Point footprint, roughly the same music-plus-crab silhouette, and a common instinct to schedule around the last warm weekend before the boats come out. That is where the overlap ends.

One is produced by a private events company. The other is produced by the City. One sells a wristband. The other opens a gate. One curates a fixed list of vendors and pours wine by the taste. The other lets the whole downtown participate, from the Opera House stage to the crab soup line at whichever restaurant enters.

The Susquehanna festival is a menu. The Waterfront Festival is a map.

That distinction is the whole post. Once you see it, the calendar sorts itself.

What The September 19 Ticket Actually Buys

The 6th Annual Susquehanna Wine & Seafood Fest runs Saturday, September 19, 2026 at 701 Concord St. in Havre de Grace, produced by B Scene Events & Promotions, LLC. It sits on the lawn at Concord Point Lighthouse, and it is unmistakably a produced event: gated footprint, timed hours, and a vendor roster that is finalized well before the gates open.

The lineup is the point. Confirmed vendors in past years have included Jimmy's Famous Seafood, Conrad's Crabs, Mason's Famous Lobster Rolls, Faidley's Seafood, Flash Crabcake Co., Shell & Barrell, Sobeachy Haitian Cuisine, London Chippy, and Cream Cruiser, drawn largely from the Baltimore seafood scene rather than the Havre de Grace kitchens most residents already know. That is a feature. You are eating things you cannot get on Washington Street on a normal Tuesday.

Beyond the food, the ticket covers a full tasting environment:

• 40+ wines, signature cocktails, and brews, plus live music, cooking demos by local chefs, wine pairings, mixology demonstrations, unique shopping, a VIP tent, and a family zone
• Waterfront setting at Concord Point Lighthouse, with dishes running from crab cakes and lobster rolls to grilled oysters, fish tacos, and Maryland steamed crabs
• Rain-or-shine format, non-refundable tickets, and proceeds benefiting Soroptimist International of Havre de Grace and other local nonprofits

Two things matter for planning. First, the event is small enough and popular enough that it is expected to sell out in advance, which means the residents who wait until Friday to decide are the residents who watch it from the promenade instead of from inside. Second, the ticket is the product. If you skip it, there is nothing to walk into.

What The Free Weekend Does Instead

The Waterfront Festival is the opposite structure. Admission is free, it is brought to you by the City of Havre de Grace, and it takes place in Concord Point Park along the Susquehanna River. There is no gate to protect and no vendor list to defend, which is why the event tends to bleed sideways into the rest of downtown rather than concentrate on one lawn.

The two anchor moments are the Friday lighted boat parade and the Saturday fireworks. In prior years the City has run a Friday evening block from 5:00 to 11:00 p.m. with a steel drum band, beer garden, vendors, and food trucks, capped by a Lighted Boat Parade at 8:00 p.m., followed by a Saturday afternoon that lands the pyrotechnics at sundown over the mouth of the Susquehanna.

The more useful thing to understand is what the festival does to the streets behind the park. Businesses throughout the downtown area offer specials, giveaways, and demonstrations; the free Ride the Tide trolley runs the loop; and participating restaurants compete in a crab soup challenge that visitors sample and vote on, with the Tide stopping at each participating restaurant. That is not a footnote. That is the actual event. The lawn holds the music and the fireworks. The town holds the meal.

Layered on top: character appearances for kids, a live Ariel show at noon at the Opera House Cultural Center, and a fireworks display beginning at sundown. It is calibrated for families who want to stroll for six hours, not for adults who want to taste through forty wines in five.

Side By Side

How Residents Actually Play Both

The trap is treating September as one long festival month and showing up to whichever weekend feels warmer. The residents who get the most out of the calendar treat the two events as different products and plan accordingly.

1. Buy the Susquehanna ticket in August, not September. The event has a history of selling out, and the September 19 date is fixed. If you want in, decide early.
2. Skip lunch that Saturday. The ticket format rewards arriving hungry at noon and grazing through the vendor list, not sampling three dishes and calling it done.
3. Treat the Waterfront Festival as a downtown night, not a park event. The lawn is the anchor. The value is the crab soup crawl through the participating restaurants and the Ride the Tide loop connecting them.
4. Pick a fireworks spot before dark. Hutchins Park sightlines are cleaner than the crowd on Concord Point itself, particularly if you have kids and a stroller in the equation.
5. Do not double-book the Opera House. The Cultural Center runs its own programming in this window; the Ariel show has historically sold out. Book it or skip it, but do not assume walk-up availability.
6. Bring cash for the Waterfront Festival. Independent vendors and restaurant crab soup stations move faster on cash than on card readers on a saturated network.

The Sell-Out Risk Cuts Only One Way

This is the sentence residents most often get wrong. The free festival cannot sell out. The ticketed one can, and does. If you have been to both and remember the Susquehanna crowd as tighter than the Waterfront crowd, that is not because more people showed up. It is because the footprint is smaller and the vendor lines are the whole event. Once tickets are gone, they are gone, and the workaround is not "just show up." The workaround is walking the promenade with a sandwich from home and looking in.

The Waterfront Festival is the mirror image. There is nothing to buy in advance beyond the optional pirate show seat and the Opera House ticket, and the crowd disperses across three parks and the length of Washington Street. You can drop in for an hour at 4 p.m. and leave before the fireworks, and you will still have had the full civic version of the event.

The Local Read

Havre de Grace produces one September weekend that behaves like a Baltimore food festival and one that behaves like a small-town summer send-off. Both are worth the calendar space. Neither substitutes for the other. The residents who understand the two events are actually two products, priced and structured for different afternoons, get the food-and-wine day and the fireworks-and-crab-soup night without paying twice or missing either.

If you are new to town, or new enough that this is your first September as a homeowner here, mark September 19 on a paper calendar this week, and leave the Waterfront Festival weekend open to drift. That is the correct order of operations.

When you are ready to talk about the house that anchors those September walks home from Concord Point, Rose Calderone + Co. is a short conversation away. Schedule a consultation with Rose.