VyStar Pavilion Port Wentworth Opens Its Doors at 912 Community Day
Port Wentworth spent four years building toward one Saturday morning. On September 12, the city cut the ribbon on VyStar Pavilion and Ghost Pirates Ice Cove at Anchor Park, turning a construction site off Highway 21 into the biggest entertainment campus Chatham County has added in years.
The date was not an accident. 912 Day is the Coastal Empire’s own holiday, and Port Wentworth used it to hand the community the keys.
What actually opened
VyStar Pavilion is a covered amphitheater at 20 Anchor Park Blvd, built for thousands and already broken in. Its first concerts, the Sunset Jazz Festival and a near sellout night with Billy Currington and Kip Moore, came before the ribbon ever got cut. Saturday made it official.
Next door, Ghost Pirates Ice Cove opened as the training home of the Savannah Ghost Pirates, and it is not a members-only building. The Ice Cove ran free public skating all day and put hockey exhibitions on the ice so families could see what the facility does when it is working.
Mayor Tracy Saunders led the ceremony. City Manager Steve Davis put the scale of it plainly.
It’s a fantastic accomplishment for the city to complete a project of this magnitude. We could not have done it without the support of our partners Zawyer Sports and Oak View Group.
What the day looked like
912 Community Day ran 11 AM to 3 PM and was free the whole way through. Live music played the Pavilion. Food trucks lined up outside. There were inflatables, games, crafts and a mechanical bull for the kids who had already burned through the skating.
Because it was a Saturday in September, the venue also put college football on the big screens, which meant a fair number of parents found a seat and stayed put while their kids kept moving.
That mix is the point of the place. The VyStar Pavilion was not built as a concert venue with a rink attached. It was built so a family can show up with no ticket, no plan and no budget, and still fill four hours.
Who put it together
The Pavilion carries VyStar Credit Union’s name through a partnership with Oak View Group, which manages Anchor Park alongside Zawyer Sports. The VyStar Pavilion was made financially possible through the City of Wentworth and Zawyer Sports.
VyStar Pavilion will give families, friends and neighbors a place to come together, celebrate and create lasting memories.
That is Dana Karzan, VyStar’s chief marketing officer, in the credit union’s announcement. More than 900 people worked on the project across four years. On Saturday most of them got to watch it be used for the first time by the people it was built for.
What Anchor Park means for the rest of the year
Port Wentworth now has a venue that can hold a national touring act, a youth hockey program and a free community festival in the same week. For a city of this size, that is a different kind of calendar.
The next test comes fast. La Fiesta Hispana takes over VyStar Pavilion on Friday, September 25 from 5:30 to 9:00 PM, a free celebration of Hispanic culture with live music, food trucks and vendors. It is the first big cultural event the Pavilion hosts since the ribbon cutting, and it will show what the venue looks like when the whole Coastal Empire is invited.
Plan your next few weekends with us
La Fiesta Hispana is September 25 at VyStar Pavilion. Art Walk follows on September 26 at Tanger Outlets Savannah, 10 AM to 4 PM, free. Both are on the Live Like Locals events calendar, along with everything else worth leaving the house for this fall.