Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, NC: Part I

In the metropolitan Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Cary, North Carolina, there are a few notable amphitheaters where outdoor performances are staged on a regular basis during pleasant weather. 

I don't profess to know every one of these kinds of venues in the area, but the ones I mention below are the ones I've heard about most in the years I've been here.

Perhaps the most notable of those is the Red Hat Amphitheatre in downtown Raleigh, and even as I compose this post, it is undergoing a major change. Construction is occurring about a block south of its current site in a project the city launched to facilitate the amphitheater's move there to new quarters. 

The new digs is only part of the real purpose for the move. The relocation appears to be primarily to accommodate an expansion of the city’s convention center onto the amphitheater’s current site, which is adjacent to the center.

Red Hat hosts big name artists for outdoor performances. This season’s schedule, for instance, features appearances by Barenaked Ladies, Kansas, the Pixies, the Black Keys, Rick Springfield, John Legend, Goo Goo Dolls, Counting Crows and Primus.

Another metro area outdoor venue is Coastal Credit Union Music Park on the city’s southeast side. It was built by the city, is operated by Live Nation Entertainment on lease from the city, and is known for hosting large concerts by big-name performers. This year’s schedule includes Mumford & Sons, Keith Urban, Rod Stewart, Luke Bryan, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, and Cyndi Lauper.

And then there is the more modest but equally important Koka Booth Amphitheatre in suburban Cary, which might be best known for its hosting of the annual North Carolina Chinese Lantern Festival for an extended period during the Christmas season and as the venue for the North Carolina Symphony’s summer concert series.

Koka Booth is the centerpiece of a 14-acre wooded area that is a component in a massive mixed-use development known as Regency Park, which in its entirety constitutes 705 acres. It sits alongside Symphony Lake, and a large state nature preserve, Hemlock Bluffs, and another city park, Harold D. Ritter, are side by side a short jaunt southeast off Kildaire Farm Road, although the latter two are not part of Regency Park.

This amphitheater’s 20025 scheduled performances features a lineup just as daunting as the venues cited above. On the schedule are Toad the Wet Sprocket, Alison Kraus and Union Station, Australian Pink Floyd, Kool and the Gang, UB40 and two festivals — Beer Bourbon and BBQ (a three-day affair) and Whiskey, Wine and Fire (one day only).

Koka Booth Amphitheatre (shown in the photo leading off the post and again immediately below) is where I found myself on Thursday, April 25. I purposely picked a day when there was nothing going on there. Because the amphitheater is only part of the Cary municipal park,  I'm going to break up my blog posts on the visit into two parts. This one is devoted to just the amphitheater, and the other to photos of the rest of the park. 

 

Koka Booth has a variety of seating options. There are tables sprinkled in front of the stage (see photo above), which I presume fetch a premium price. There is lawn seating immediately behind these seats (the leadoff photo doesn’t do the lawn area justice; there is quite a bit of space there). And there are more tables and seats behind the lawn on an elevated and covered platform (see three perspective and closeup photos below). 

The amphitheater opened in 2000 as The Amphitheater in Regency Park. Just a few years later, it was renamed in honor of Koka Booth, a music lover who served as Cary mayor from 1987-99 and as town councilman for 10 years before that. A bust of Booth appears just outside the amphitheater lawn (see first three photos below). 

In my years living in Indianapolis, my home was easy walking distance from Garfield Park and its longtime amphitheater, MacAllister, which has a storied history of hosting a variety of events, including symphony, dance, rock and other music performances as well as cultural festivals and the summer season presentations of the all-volunteer Garfield Shakespeare Company theater troupe.

Because of that background in Indy, I made my way to Koka Booth with great interest and curiosity. I knew I’d be mentally comparing venues, but I did not expect to be as impressed as I was when I saw Koka Booth and the park.

I’d estimate that Garfield Park is slightly larger than Regency, but it doesn’t have a lake (its waterways are Pleasant Run and Bean Creek), and its amphitheater does not have the varied seating, customer-service accommodations or technical features that Koka Booth possesses.

Below are more photos of the amphitheater. To view a full gallery of images from my shoot on Thursday, follow the link in this sentence.

Rural Chatham County churches on Mt. Gilead Church Road

When I left Fearrington Village (see yesterday’s post) to head home, my iPhone map directed me to turn off Highway 15-501 onto Mt. Gilead Church Road, which would eventually connect me with Highway 64 to head east toward Raleigh. 

While on that relatively short leg of Mt. Gilead Church Road, I came across two churches that caught my eye, so I made spontaneous stops to photograph each of them. Both also had graveyards adjacent to the church property. 

By far, my favorite of the photos I took of the two churches was the one of Mt. Gilead Baptist that is leading off the post. I don't think I could have asked for a better tree framing opportunity. A few other shots and angles and one shot of an ancillary structure on the property appear below. They are followed by four images of the graveyard.

A short distance south of Mt. Gilead Baptist is Haw River Baptist, which I came upon apparently as Sunday services were breaking up for the day. 

I was questioned by at least two church members (one of whom might have even have been the pastor) as I tried to hurry my shots so I could get out their hair. It was a very nice looking church, so I wanted to get at least a few pictures. The six images you see here are everything I took from the visit. 

As for James and Annie Fearrington, whose names appear on the grave marker closest to the parking lot in the fourth photo below, I was not able to ascertain if they have any connection to the nearby Fearrington Village.

One oddity of note about this stop. At home while preparing this post, I looked up the two churches on my Maps app, and the app places Haw River Baptist Church on the west side of Mt. Gilead Church Road, the same side of the road as the Mt. Gilead church. But I can say from first-hand, on-site experience that the Haw River church is on the east side of the road. (shrug)

Chatham County's Fearrington Village inspired by idyllic English villages

In 1974, R.B. and Jenny Fitch purchased a 640-acre farm in northeast Chatham County, North Carolina, with a vision to transform the property into a community inspired by the villages the Fitches had visited and admired in England. 

The land had been owned and farmed by several generations of Fearringtons, who inherited the acreage in 1915 from the great-granddaughter of the original owner, William Cole Sr., and her husband Edwin M. Fearrington.

The Fitches’ Fearrington Village was the first planned-unit development in the county and one of the first in the state of North Carolina. The village’s population in the 2020 census was 2,557, making it the third largest community wholly situated in Chatham County, behind only Siler City and Pittsboro.

I first heard about it just three years ago when a former Indianapolis work colleague called me to say he was coming to town and wanted to meet for lunch with several other former work colleagues who also happened to be living in the area at the time. 

He said he was staying at Fearrington House Inn in Fearrington Village then tried to describe it to me when I asked him what and where that was because I hadn’t heard of it before. When I got home from our lunch, I checked out the community’s website, after which I put the village on the mental back burner as a place I wanted to visit with my camera.

That visit came to pass Sunday afternoon. I spent almost the entire time at Fearrington Village perusing the village center and nearby Camden Park and its ponds (see photo of the park above). I didn’t see many homes, just a couple score along the village center perimeter. And because there was a lot of similarity in those perimeter area homes, I didn’t feel driven or motivated to venture deeper into the development. 

Maybe that was a mistake. I was also tired by this time; I’d spent the morning walking 3 miles through the nearby town of Pittsboro (see previous post). So maybe I was needing a convenient excuse to call it a day.

But I will say I found a lot of photogenic scenes just in the village center. And my favorite image of the day, the photo leading off the post, was a composition along a street of some of those homes along the village center perimeter. It’s a composition I made by compressing a long distance using the longest focal range on my 28-300mm Tamron zoom lens.

To view a full gallery of images from the Fearrington Village shoot, follow the link in this sentence. 

A first-time visitor like me gets this initial view of the Fearrington acreage after turning off of Highways 15-501 onto Village Way leading into the village center. 

The realty office (above), barn (first photo below), Fearrington House Restaurant (second photo below), McIntyre’s Books (third photo below) and Belted Goat eatery (fourth photo below) are among key components of the village center. 

A healthy dose of mature trees is a big deal in the village center, as the photos above and the first three below attest. 

As one approaches the restaurant, this precisely manicured maize of bushes is there to behold. I got the perspective of the maize below by holding the camera over my head, pointing in the direction I thought would be accurate, focusing and then tripping the shutter. I was pleased to be able to do it in one take. 

Above and below: The Fearrington Village Garden is situated near the guest accommodations, and I would imagine few guests miss a chance to walk through here to fully appreciate it. 

The village has what it calls a cutting garden near the main garden (above). I presume it means residents (and guests?) are welcome to take some of these plants.

Above: Another couple businesses in the village center. 

Above and first three photos below: Homes in the village center perimeter area. 

Above and first two photos below: A few more frames from pictures I took in Camden Park. 

Above and below: These concrete sheep are located in an open area of Camden Park, although I'm not sure of the sheep’s significance. I do know the park was dedicated to Jenny Fitch who died in 1995, the year the park's development was completed. The park is also referred to as Jenny's Park. 

Above: With all the village's amenities, one would wonder why would residents want to approach the real world. But apparently there are some who enjoy sitting on chairs on the village lawn and look out onto Highway 501 traffic from afar.