CORRECTION: Bangor's waterfront concert venue is changing its name
Oct. 12—The venue on the Bangor Waterfront will have a new name for next year's concert season, after eight years of being known as the Darling's Waterfront Pavilion.
The venue will be renamed the Maine Savings Amphitheater for the 2022 concert season and going forward, Waterfront Concerts, the company that books concerts at the venue, announced on Tuesday.
The name change comes after a new, multi-year sponsorship agreement with the Hampden-based credit union was signed.
"We are grateful for this partnership, the Bangor community, and all our sponsors and partners since we began on the Bangor Waterfront in 2010," Alex Gray, president of Waterfront Concerts, said Tuesday.
Darling's, the Bangor-based company that owns multiple car dealerships across the state, was the first company to purchase naming rights to the venue, starting in 2013. It chose not to renew its sponsorship agreement.
The new name comes on the heels of the 2020 and 2021 concert seasons, which were either substantially shortened or canceled outright due to the pandemic. Gray and concert promoters around the globe are banking on the 2022 season being their big comeback, if COVID-19 can be brought under control to allow the public to flood back to concerts.
"There is just a huge amount of pent-up demand," Gray told the Bangor Daily News in August. "The amount of tours that have been rescheduled over the past two years means that some of the biggest artists in the world — artists that we've been trying to get for years — are now a real possibility for Bangor. It should be an incredible year for music."
Waterfront Concerts has already finished more renovations to the venue, including newly elevated lawn seating. Between now and June 2022, it expects to add luxury suites, season seats, upgraded seating and concessions, and new permanent bathrooms throughout the venue.
The company has asked the Bangor City Council for an extension on the contract it signed with the city to complete the renovations, which were stalled due to the pandemic and were supposed to be completed this year. The council will take up the measure at Wednesday's meeting. Its approval would allow the company to complete the renovations by spring 2022.
Maine Savings Federal Credit Union previously had the naming rights for Waterfront Concerts' other Maine venue, the Maine Savings Pavilion in Westbrook, at the Rock Row development. It will transfer the naming rights to the Bangor venue, while the Westbrook venue will debut a new name sometime in 2022, according to Christopher Rudolph, Waterfront Concerts' director of community relations and corporate partnerships.
The company intends to refer to the Bangor venue as the "Maine Savings Amp."
Correction: A previous version of this report misstated the name of Maine Savings Federal Credit Union and the name of the Westbrook concert venue.
