Riverfest Saturday, Marathon Sunday, Then Quiet: How Downtown Yonkers Spends This Weekend

Walk along Larkin Plaza on a weekday morning right now and you would not guess what is coming. The stage risers are still in storage. The Yonkers Waterfront Amphitheatre, which hosted a free concert every Friday night in June, July, and August, has gone dark for the season. In two weeks the same stretch of waterfront will hold more than 15,000 people, then empty out again by Sunday afternoon and stay quiet until Halloween. Most calendars list Riverfest and the Yonkers Marathon as two separate items on the same weekend. They are not separate. They are the same 48 hours doing two completely different jobs to the same three blocks of downtown.

Saturday takes over the ground. Sunday runs past it.

Yonkers Riverfest happens on Saturday, September 19, from noon to 7 p.m., centered on Larkin Plaza and the Yonkers Riverfront. It is free, and the Yonkers Downtown/Waterfront Business Improvement District has booked Lisa Lisa, DJ Frankie Cutlass, and The Lady Gaga Experience featuring Haus of Monsters across the day's lineup. Last year's edition ran 10 live bands and more than 140 food, craft, and community vendors across the footprint. This year's crowd is expected to land in the same range the BID has reported for recent editions: over 15,000 people moving through a stretch of waterfront that, on a normal Saturday, holds a fraction of that.

That is the part worth sitting with if you live nearby. Riverfest does not pass through downtown. It occupies it. Larkin Plaza, the amphitheater lawn, and the vendor rows along the waterfront become the event for seven straight hours. If you want to get somewhere on foot that afternoon, you are threading through it, not around it.

Sunday works differently. The Yonkers Marathon starts at 8 a.m. at the Yonkers Train Station on Buena Vista Avenue, the same waterfront corridor Riverfest just filled the day before, but this time the crowd moves. The race is in its 99th year, which the city describes as the second-oldest certified marathon in the United States, and it doubles as a Boston Marathon qualifier under USA Track & Field certification. In past runnings, the downtown blocks near the start were coned off rather than fully closed, meaning traffic got routed around runners rather than stopped outright, while the northern stretch of the course ran through neighborhoods with light, police-directed traffic. If that pattern holds this year, Sunday morning is inconvenient in specific places rather than shut down entirely, which is the opposite of what Saturday does to the same ground.

So the weekend has a shape most people miss: the day that sounds smaller on paper, a footrace instead of a festival, is actually the one that lets you keep something like a normal Sunday. The day that sounds like background noise, a free outdoor concert, is the one that takes the whole plaza.

Dinner depends on which night you actually have off

If you are trying to eat out this weekend, the two nights point in different directions.

Saturday, with Riverfest wrapping around 7 p.m. and a downtown full of people already out, is the night for The Sea Fire Grill. The upscale seafood restaurant opened on October 8, 2025, at 71 Water Grant Street, the historic Yonkers City Pier space that spent years as Xaviars on the Hudson. Benjamin Restaurant Group, the family behind Benjamin Steakhouse and Benjamin Prime in Manhattan and Benjamin Steakhouse in Greenburgh, rebuilt the interior with a lighter, more open floor plan and 180-degree views of the Hudson and the New York City skyline. Executive Chef Arturo McLeod runs a menu built around contemporary American seafood, dry-aged steaks, and a raw bar. It is close enough to Larkin Plaza that Riverfest crowds naturally spill toward it once the music ends, which means a Saturday reservation is worth locking in ahead of time rather than hoping for a walk-in table.

Sunday morning calls for something else entirely. Yonkers Brewing Co. sits near the Buena Vista parking lot where the marathon starts and finishes, and it opens early specifically to catch half-marathon finishers coming off the course. It is not trying to be a destination the way the pier restaurant is. It is the place that is already there, already open, and already full of people comparing splits over breakfast. If your Sunday plans involve cheering someone across a finish line before 11 a.m., that is where the morning actually happens, not at a restaurant built around evening river views.

The rest of the summer calendar already closed itself out

Here is what makes Riverfest weekend different from just another entry on a busy summer schedule: almost everything else already ended. The Friday night Waterfront Live concert series wrapped its final show in late August. The city's own free Summer Concert in the Park series closed out the same week, with a show at Untermyer Park on August 27 and another the following night at the E.J. Murray Memorial Skating Center. By the time Riverfest opens on September 19, it is not one date among several. It is the last big public gathering downtown before the calendar goes quiet.

That quiet is real, and it lasts a while. After the marathon finishers head home Sunday afternoon, the next scheduled event on the Yonkers Downtown/Waterfront BID's calendar is the Halloween Pet Parade and Fashion Contest at the waterfront, paired with a 21-and-over Halloween bar crawl through downtown. After that, the BID's next signature date is the Getty Square Holiday Tree Lighting Ceremony in December. Between Riverfest weekend and Halloween, downtown Yonkers runs on its ordinary rhythm rather than its festival one.

A few things keep running through that gap without needing an event permit. The Science Barge at Yonkers Pier stays open through October, offering a look at sustainable food production on the water while the crowds from Riverfest are long gone. The farmers market at St. John's Church, which claims the distinction of being the oldest in Westchester, keeps its regular schedule regardless of what else is or is not happening on the waterfront that week. If you live downtown and want something to do on a random October Saturday, these are the two things that do not disappear once the stage risers get packed back up.

What this means if you are watching the neighborhood, not just the weekend

None of this is really about the marathon or the concert lineup. It is about how downtown Yonkers actually behaves when a lot of people show up at once, which is useful information whether you are planning a Saturday or thinking about what it is like to live three blocks from Larkin Plaza year round. The waterfront can absorb 15,000 people for an afternoon and hand the same ground back to a footrace the next morning without either event canceling out the other, as long as you know which day does which. That kind of rhythm, big and loud for one weekend, then genuinely quiet for weeks, is part of what daily life along this stretch of the Hudson actually looks like.

If you are already living here, you probably knew half of this. If you are new to the neighborhood, or thinking about what it would mean to be a few blocks from all of it, that is the kind of local detail worth having before you plan around it.

If questions about the neighborhood turn into questions about buying, selling, or renting somewhere along this stretch of the Hudson, Christine Naber is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.