As making a life in Tampa grows more complicated every week, one aspect of downtown living has stayed almost completely the same for the last decade-and-a-half.
“It is what it is, right—it’s three bands,” Joe D’Acunto told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about the Rock the Park series he’s booked for the last 15 years.
Born just months after then-Mayor Pam Iorio cut the ribbon on Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park, the free concert on the first Thursday of every month was the brainchild of a promoter in his early-30s and the equally fresh-faced people calling the shots at the Tampa Downtown Partnership.
“The Riverwalk was supposed to be coming in soon, so it was meant to get ahead of all that and help shape this jewel of downtown with programming that was family-friendly, something to create a culture of music in the district,” D’Acunto, 46, added.
Launched a year before Spotify landed in the U.S., the vision for Rock The Park was to create a playlist for music fans whose tastes cover multiple genres. A grab bag of styles and flavors that represent not just the city, but music as a whole. The formula, D’Acunto added, has always been to give up-and-coming bands a platform while celebrating existing legacy acts from around the region.
“The music community itself has embraced it, so in that manner it kind of directs itself,” he noted about the way the series has taken on a life of its own.
Set on the north side of the park, with the Tampa Museum of Art and Glazer Children’s Museum behind it, the concert places visitors on the terrace steps facing south as they watch bands play. The backdrop includes familiar sights (read: Beer Can Building), but the skyline has also grown up around the concert series. Playing the stage is a rite of passage for any outfit that hopes to build a following not just locally, but nationally, too.
Drummer and sound man Andrew Kilmartin has brought his PA to the park for all but perhaps three Rock the Park shows.
Ivy Lupco started working at the Tampa Downtown Partnership as an events lead in 2018 and is now Manager of Public Space Placemaking & Programming. She told CL that there have been 180 iterations of Rock the Park in the last 15 years. A few lineups have had just two bands, and a spoken word poet makes the bill occasionally, but she estimates that the series has platformed and supported nearly 500 artists.
Every one of those artists will have their name on the back of special commemorative t-shirts that’ll be given to the first 100 fans who arrive at the anniversary show this week.
D’Acunto—who’s booked shows locally since 1998—can remember pretty much every one of those bands and has a few highlights including a set from a then-fledgling Florida indie-rock band Flipturn, which went on to play Tampa’s Gasparilla Music Festival and most recently Lollapalooza in Chicago.
“The park was packed, and there were hundreds of their fans on their feet their entire time singing along. All the while, people are walking babies in strollers, moving around the park, getting food from a local vendor,” he said. “It was just one of those all encompassing ‘holy shit,’ moments. Like, not only is this band great, but they’re going to be exceptional.”
The future of pop music will once again be on display for Rock the Park’s 15th anniversary thanks to a headlining performance from high-energy rap ensemble Barely Legal Collective (aka the “Black Backstreet Boys”), which takes the stage after sets from Gainesville’s six-piece Sooza party brass band plus tried, true and always-evolving Americana-rock hero Have Gun, Will Travel.
Mark Anthony’s MA Art will do live painting as food trucks like Jam Dish (by chef Mugabe Tenn whose reggae band Tribal Style is a Rock the Park alum) and Boy Named Sous feed concertgoers.
D’Acunto has literally watched kids who used to come to Rock the Park bring their own bands to the stage, but he’s most grateful to just get an opportunity to be a kind of cultural steward of the event.
“It’s my favorite thing that we do because it is about community. It is about family and about exposing young artists to a different crowd,” he added. “So it kind of embodies everything that I love about concert promotion and booking.”
Could Rock the Park go another 15 years?
Kenyetta Hairston-Bridges has been President and CEO of the Tampa Downtown Partnership for less than a year, but recently wrote in a press release that she’s “quickly seen how special this tradition is.”
So special in fact, that it’s inspired the partnership to listen to all of downtown’s neighborhoods and develop other series like Tampa Heights’ “Rhythm & Hues’ alleyway art show and a forthcoming quarterly jazz concert series set for Central Park within the Encore development near the former site of a famed Black Tampa neighborhood commonly referred to as The Scrub.
What’s more is that Lupco definitively told CL that Rock the Park—which moves to the Hub dive bar when it rains and even happened remotely during COVID lockdowns—is not going anywhere.
“It’s a staple of the community. It’s made a name for itself. We’ve developed all these other programs and categories of programs, and it’s its own category,” she said. “We won’t even buckle it into another category—it’s Rock the Park.”
There’s no cover for the Rock the Park 15th anniversary happening Thursday, Sept. 4 at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park in Tampa.
Full disclosure: This writer will host the 15th anniversary of Rock the Park Tampa, but I totally would’ve written this story even if I wasn’t doing it.
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This article appears in Sept. 4-10, 2025.