[garysanfran]

For The Weirs...

Bring back Teen Haven and the big name concerts at Winnipesaukee Gardens. Late night teen hangouts can be successful.

Jack Irwin said...

“There was a place called Teen Haven just up the street where young people got together to dance. We started to change what we offered for music, putting on concerts from time to time instead of having big band dance music,” Jack recalls.
Among the big names which came to the Gardens at that time were the Beach Boys and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. “We’d get 2200 people in for a show and have two shows a night. But it was a different generation, different music. It was more of a show than dancing.”

Yup...Fond memories

I "attended" many concerts sitting in my boat with the "girl-of-my-dreams" floating outside of The Gardens listening to The Vanilla Fudge or The Turtles, etc.

And the BIG BAND era...More from Jack

Irwin’s Winnipesaukee Gardens opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1925 and was an instant hit with the music-loving public of the 1920s. Top bands touring the country now had a new, lively place to play in, one with an ideal lakeside setting that was perfect for a summer night. And WKAV was soon conducting live broadcasts from the Gardens, bringing the Big Band sound to listeners all over New Hampshire.

And Irwin was quick to capitalize on the bathing beauty phenomena which had been started by Atlantic City’s Miss America Pageant in 1919, creating the Miss Winnipesaukee Pageant the very same year that the Gardens opened. The pageant is still going strong and has produced more Miss New Hampshire winners than any other pageant in the state.

Jack Irwin says that until the crash of 1929, everything went great for screen above the stage.the Gardens, which also offered movies which could be viewed on a big
Jack says that he can still remember watching movies from the balcony, as well as some of the best band acts ever.

“I was just a little kid when I saw Fats Waller around 1938 or 1939. If my parents couldn’t get a babysitter they’d bring me to the Gardens and let me sit in the balcony and watch things until I fell asleep,” he says.

At one time or another just about all of the big bands played at the Gardens, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Harry James and Paul Whiteman. “About the only big names we didn’t get were Louie Armstrong and Guy Lombardo. It was the liveliest spot in the state, along with the Hampton Casino, for many years,” says Jack.

“Tuesdays and Thursdays were Big Band nights. That’s when we’d get those Big Bands which were touring the country. We’d have bands playing every night except Sunday. The house band played the other nights and they lived right up here at the Weirs all summer. The Tony Brown orchestra was one of the house bands and a lot of people liked to come by during the week to dance because prices doubled on the weekend, when we always had a full house.”