Friday, August 14 was the last night of Yonkers Waterfront Live. No encore, no last-minute extension. The Yonkers Downtown/Waterfront Business Improvement District ran the series every Friday from June 5 through that date, 6:30 to 8:00 at the amphitheater at 71 Water Grant Street, and then it simply stopped. If you spent your summer Fridays down there with a folding chair and a to-go cup, you already know the crowd that showed up for Motown and soul tributes thins out fast once the calendar flips.
Here's what most people walking past the pier this week don't realize: the season isn't over. It changed shape. And the five weeks between now and Yonkers Riverfest on September 19 are arguably the better half of the summer, if you know where the programming moved.
What Actually Ended on August 14
The Friday series was built for volume. BID Executive Director Sara Brody has called it one of the signature traditions of summer in Yonkers, and the numbers back that up: free admission, thousands of attendees most weeks, a lineup built around Latin, soul, jazz, and tribute acts pulling from Bad Bunny to James Brown. It's loud, it's crowded, and it's designed so you can wander down without a plan and still have a good night.
That model has a natural ceiling. Once Labor Day gets close, a free outdoor series with folding chairs and a sound system stops making sense logistically. So the BID wraps it in mid-August, on schedule, the way it has for years.
What replaces it isn't nothing. It's a different program entirely, one most residents conflate with the Friday series simply because it's also outdoors, also near the water, and also called a concert.
The Second Season, a Mile Uphill
Untermyer Gardens Conservancy runs its own summer series, the Minnie Untermyer Concert Series, in the Walled Garden amphitheater at 945 North Broadway. This is its sixth year, and 2026's run spans May 30 through September 12 with seven performances total. It is not the BID's series. It's ticketed, it's smaller, and it leans classical, jazz, and folk rather than tribute-band crowd-pleasers.
Three dates remain on the 2026 calendar, spread across the next four weeks:
- August 16 (tonight): the Victor LaGamma Jazz Quartet, a longstanding favorite at Untermyer, with LaGamma on piano, Dylan LaGamma on bass, Jon Doty on drums, and Matt Garrison on sax. Tickets run $25.
- August 30: Sonnambula, a historically informed ensemble performing Italian and French works of the early Baroque, built around Arcangelo Corelli and Nicola Matteis. $35.
- September 12: Lori Belilove and the Isadora Duncan Dance Company return for an evening of dance, with a rain date the following day. $35.
Every show runs 6:00 to 7:00 with no intermission, rain or shine, moving indoors to the Community Room of the Cola Center only if weather forces it. The Conservancy also holds free tickets for Yonkers youth ages 7 to 18, funded through a grant from the Asbjorn Lunde Foundation, so this isn't priced only for out-of-towners looking for a garden concert.
The point isn't that Untermyer is better than the pier. It's that they're not the same season at all, and the calendar overlap has made people think one ending means both did.
Same Pier, Emptier, Better for Dinner
Walk back down to 71 Water Grant Street this week and you'll find the amphitheater silent, but the address hasn't gone dark. Sea Fire Grill sits right there on the pier, a Benjamin Restaurant Group project that opened with a ribbon-cutting presided over by Mayor Mike Spano on October 8, 2025, with its first day of service the following morning, Thursday, October 9. The space has real pedigree behind it: the same group runs Sea Fire Grill in Manhattan along with Benjamin Steakhouse locations in Manhattan and Greenburgh, and Executive Chef Arturo McLeod's menu runs toward chilled whole lobster, Spanish octopus, and roasted Nova Scotia halibut alongside steaks and pasta.
That pier has carried a dining reputation since 2007, when chef Peter Kelly first opened Xaviars there. What's changed for a local diner this month isn't the food, it's the reservation. A restaurant built for a full skyline view now gets that view without three hundred people between you and the water.
For something less formal, One Pier Steakhouse sits on the same waterfront near the Metro-North stop, with Chef Manuel Saldivar's kitchen turning out fried calamari and lobster ravioli in a setting easy enough for a weeknight. And a five-minute walk up to Larkin Plaza gets you Lost Borough Ice Cream, a small-batch shop at 1 Larkin Plaza that Patrick Cruz started making from his Yonkers home back in 2019 before partnering with New Rochelle's Kawana Jefferson to open the storefront. The name itself is a piece of local history: it references 1898, when Yonkers and Mount Vernon both had the option to merge into New York City as new boroughs and both refused, a decision Cruz has described as making Yonkers the borough lost to time.
The River That Wasn't Supposed to Be There
If you're walking between dinner and a concert, Larkin Plaza is worth the extra ten minutes on its own. What runs through it now, the daylighted stretch of the Saw Mill River at Van der Donck Park, spent most of the 20th century buried under a parking lot. The city ran a concrete flume over the river starting in 1917, finished burying it by 1922, and it stayed covered for nearly ninety years until an eighteen-month restoration brought the water back into the open in 2011. The first 800 feet of that project cost 24 million dollars, according to National Geographic's coverage, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated it a National Urban Wildlife Refuge in 2014.
It's easy to walk past it without registering what you're looking at: a river, in the middle of a downtown, that engineers deliberately uncovered rather than built. Mallards, painted turtles, and American eel have all been documented in the water since. It's a strange thing to have five minutes from a steakhouse reservation, and most people who've lived here for years still haven't stopped to read the small interpretive signage along the walkway.
The Real Finale Isn't August
If the Friday series felt like the season's headline, the actual closing date is still five weeks out. Yonkers Riverfest, presented by the same BID that ran the summer concerts, takes over the waterfront on Saturday, September 19. It's the largest one-day festival in Westchester County, and last year's edition pulled more than 15,000 people for ten live bands and over 140 food, craft, and community vendors, plus a circus, a ninja obstacle course, rides, and games.
That's the number worth holding onto if you're the kind of person who assumed the season quietly ended on a Friday in mid-August. It didn't. It handed off to a smaller, ticketed garden series for four weeks, then closes with a single day that dwarfs any individual Friday concert by a wide margin.
Living near this stretch of the Hudson means the calendar rewards people who know the difference between the BID's programming and the Conservancy's, between a pier built for crowds and the same pier built for a quiet dinner, and between a season that looks finished and one that's just changed rooms.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of lower Westchester, or you already call it home and want a second opinion on what a property here is actually worth once you factor in a walk to Larkin Plaza or a ticket to the Walled Garden, I'm always glad to talk it through. Reach out to Susan Hawkins to schedule a consultation.
