The stage backdrop is a demolished New York skyscraper. Rock the Ruins at Holliday Park, 6363 Spring Mill Road in Indianapolis, is a summer concert series played on the lawn behind The Ruins - Karl Bitter's Races of Man limestone statues, salvaged when Manhattan's St. Paul Building came down in the 1950s and won by Indianapolis in a national competition. Local artist Elmer Taflinger spent two decades assembling the sculptures, columns and fountains into the folly that now anchors the 94-acre park, and a 3.2-million-dollar campaign by Friends of Holliday Park restored the long-fenced-off installation for its 2016 reopening. The concert series arrived in 2021, created by Forty5 - the owners of Broad Ripple's Vogue Theatre - after the pandemic forced promoters outdoors; they discovered the park had hosted small concerts under the same name decades earlier and revived the banner at scale. The format is bring-your-own lawn chairs and blankets on the green space behind the ruins, roughly 2,500 per show, with food and drink vendors on site and national touring acts running July through September - Indigo Girls, Big Thief, Greensky Bluegrass, De La Soul, Trombone Shorty and Manchester Orchestra among recent seasons. The series draws about 21,000 fans across each summer, with proceeds flowing back to the Holliday Park Foundation - the concerts effectively funding the park that hosts them. Parking fills fast on show nights; overflow lots run shuttles, and the general-admission entrance off Spring Mill Road handles rideshare drop-offs for a crowd that skews neighbourhood-local in a way few amphitheatre series manage. The series has since expanded to a second park - Broad Ripple Park joined Holliday on the calendar - and the shows run rain or shine short of severe weather, with sunset across the limestone colonnade timed almost perfectly to the opening act in midsummer.

Type: Outdoors

Address: 6363 Spring Mill Rd, Indianapolis, IN, United States, 46260

Website: https://rocktheruins.com

Cover Charge: 1

Capacity: 2500

Opening Date: 01/07/2021

Serves Food

Outdoor Area