Local focus, festival energizing Red Bank business community

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In Red Bank, what’s old is new again: After almost a decade in other hands, the town’s annual summer festival is returning under its old moniker, RiverFest.

The three-day festival, to be held June 3 to 5, is once again being put together by the Eastern Monmouth Area Chamber of Commerce after the Jersey Shore Jazz and Blues Foundation held its own Jazz and Blues Festival for years during that weekend.

“We want it to be all about what makes Red Bank and the Red Bank area great,” said Lynda Rose, president of EMACC.
RiverFest will have about 20 local artists peddling their wares; well-known area musicians; and local restaurants offering diverse dishes like mahi mahi burgers, lobster rolls and broccoli rabe, in addition to the typical hot dogs and hamburgers.

The focus on Red Bank was important, especially since local restaurants had slowly stopped participating in the festival when it was run by JSJBF, said Danny Murphy, one of the festival’s founders, who is involved again this year. He wants to see RiverFest as it was in the ’90s, when people who grew up in the area, but moved away, would return to attend.

“Every year, I would see people I hadn’t seen in years were at that event,” said Murphy, owner of Murphy Grill and Wine Bar — formerly Murphy’s Steakhouse, Seafood and Sushi Bar.
Putting together the festival was a little more difficult than in the past, because EMACC found out only six months ahead of time that it was going to run it again — in years past, the event would evolve over the course of a full year. Despite the hustle, Murphy said RiverFest had been held for so many years that there was an easy formula to put it back together. The biggest challenge the organizers face is getting the word out that this year’s RiverFest is going to be a revival of how it was in the ’80s and ’90s.

RiverFest originated in 1981 as 14 restaurants serving food under one tent. From there, the event grew to include music, arts and crafts, and boat rides on the Navesink River, which runs by the festival’s home at Marine Park.
At the time the festival began, the local restaurants in the area viewed one another as competition. According to Murphy, the creation of the festival caused operators to work together in a way they otherwise would not have, and it caught on. Even now, the festival’s food vendors primarily are local restaurants.

After growing a few years, the festival called itself RiverFest, and in 1990, it partnered with JSJBF, also based in Red Bank. At that point, the festival had grown so much that it was drawing upwards of 100,000 people for the weekend, according to Murphy.

In the early 2000s, there was a split, and both EMACC and JSJBF requested to hold their own festivals on the first weekend after Memorial Day. According to Red Bank Mayor Pasquale Menna, who had been on the council at the time, the vote was split, but the weekend went to JSJBF.

The foundation ran the festival for a few years, but in 2010, JSJBF was told it couldn’t hold the festival at Marine Park, the traditional home for the event, because it was under construction and the borough didn’t know when it would be finished. So the New Jersey Jazz and Blues Festival was held at the Monmouth Park racetrack, in Oceanport.

“We got a lot of feedback from people who hoped that the chamber would run it again, because it seemed to have lost its local flavor,” Rose said. “This is our first year running it again. We’re doing a lot of fence mending.”
The mayor and council gave the weekend back to EMACC to revive RiverFest, even though JSJBF asked to come back to Red Bank this year, according to Doris Lazure, foundation manager. EMACC made the argument that times were so challenging that local restaurants should be given the chance to participate and make money during the weekend.
“I think that the general consensus was that you have local businesses that pay taxes, employ people, are here 365 days out of the year, and they wanted to at least have a chance to highlight what they do day in and day out,” Menna said. “And I think that was a very persuasive argument for the council.”

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