This Doesn’t Happen at Bluegrass Festivals
The real disaster, one fan said, was just outside the ballpark – where country-music fans, or folks who simply showed up to party at 92.5 WXTU’s free 25th anniversary show at the Susquehanna Bank Center, turned the Camden waterfront parking lots into the Wild West.
“I’m a very liberal person. I go to the Mummers Parade and Two Street. I thought it was the worst thing I ever saw in my life,” said Patricia Schaffer, of Berlin Township, Camden County, who attended the ballgame with her church group.
“Men and women were peeing through cyclone fences. while kids walked right past them. One guy put his hands over his kid’s ears.”
Riversharks General Manager Adam Lorber said the team apology was needed, adding that crowd problems and traffic headaches often arise when games coincide with large concerts.
“I had fans that were coming to the game, and there were a lot of concertgoers throwing things, shouting obscenities, and there were large-scale fights,” said Lorber, who said he received two dozen calls and e-mails from disgruntled fans.
“It hurts a lot. I would venture to say there were people at that game for the first time who won’t come back.”…
During larger concerts in Camden, nearby Cooper University Hospital often gets between 30 and 40 patients arriving from the waterfront, said Dr. Michael Chansky, chief of emergency medicine at Cooper.
“It’s mostly finding younger kids who are too drunk, sleeping on a corner or vomiting somewhere, abandoned,” Chansky said. “It’s a pretty wild scene down there, and I don’t think the Susquehanna Center or the city can handle it. They need to limit the partying, the tailgating and the public intoxication.”
Sports, music, and booze don’t mix so well in camden
As someone who’s been going to bluegrass festivals for more than a decade, and who’s seen his share of drunken rowdy campers, I can categorically say that i have NEVER seen this kind of behavior (at least not to this extent) at a bluegrass festival. I’ve seen men in prom dresses, people asleep in outhouses, people who’ve gone days (if not weeks) with neither sleep nor shower, people drunk out of their minds, but I have NEVER seen a melee like the one described above.
I don’t know why music fans in Philadelphia and New Jersey act like animals, but it’s embarrassing. Maybe it’s because the venues they go to treat them that way: lord knows the last time i was at the then-Tweeter Center, the men’s room was a disgrace, the floors covered in piss, the rank smell of shit everywhere. yeah, i realize it’s lavatory, but you could get a staph infection just by looking at it. Meanwhile, the price of beer and food is so steep, it’d cause anyone short of Donald Trump to get a case of the grumbles.
But still, there’s no excuse for acting like a stupid asshole. There’s no need to whip your dick or pussy out in front of kids and spray your urine everywhere: you’re a human being, not a labrador, so act like it.
