Bayfront Festival Park

About Bayfront Festival Park

Bayfront Festival Park is Duluth's outdoor event ground, on the harbor side behind the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center. It is a large open lawn with a stage, harbor frontage, a playground, and enough room to hold most of the city at once, which it does several times a year.

In summer it carries the concert season and the Bayfront Blues Festival, with music audible across the harbor and into Canal Park. From late November through late December it becomes Bentleyville, a free walk-through holiday lights village built out of roughly five million lights and billed as the largest free walk-through display in the country. Bentleyville alone brings enormous traffic to the Bayfront and Canal Park area for a month, with parking at the park, the DECC, and the Great Lakes Aquarium.

For nearby residents the park is a genuine amenity and a genuine noise source, depending on the night. It is also the harbor-side end of the Duluth Cross City Trail, which runs west from here toward Lincoln Park.

Good to know: outdoor concert venue, harbor frontage, playground, splash pad, event lawn, Bentleyville Tour of Lights site, Cross City Trail connection.

Neighborhoods it serves

Where these facts come from

• Canal Park district guide, Bentleyville Tour of Lights at Bayfront Festival Park accessed 2026-08-13

Last reviewed 2026-08-13 by Guide editorial.