Every September, the community gathers at Lake Boren Park for Newcastle Days, the city's signature celebration, and the flyer will tell you it runs from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. That's technically true. It's also misleading in a way that changes how you should plan your Saturday.
This year's date is September 19, 2026, again at Lake Boren Park (13058 SE 84th Way), and the nine-hour window on the schedule is really two separate events stitched together at the seam. The first half is loud, visual, and over by mid-afternoon. The second half is slower, food-and-music driven, and runs for four more hours after the first half has already packed up and driven home. If you show up once, at whatever time feels convenient, you'll get a good afternoon. If you understand where the hinge is, you get to choose which festival you actually want.
The Morning Belongs to Cars, Kids, and a Bagpiper
The day technically starts before the festival does. The Jim Price Memorial Pickleball Tournament runs 8 a.m. to noon, ahead of and overlapping the official 10 a.m. opening, which means the earliest arrivals at Lake Boren Park aren't festival-goers at all. They're competitors.
At 10 a.m., the festival proper opens with a mini parade, a short loop around the park led by Newcastle's favorite bagpiper, Neil Hubbard, with local performers, school teams, and area Scouts marching behind him. The loop ends at the main stage for the opening ceremony, which is the actual starting gun for everything else.
From there through early afternoon, the park is at its busiest and most photogenic. The Cars on the Green Auto Show runs 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with classic cruisers, muscle cars, and custom rides parked across the green and an awards ceremony at 2:30 p.m. This is also the window for the activities built for families with younger kids: giant inflatables, a petting zoo, pony rides, and carnival games hosted by local Scouts. Fire trucks and police vehicles are typically parked out for kids to climb through, and the Newcastle Cemetery holds an open house for anyone curious about the town's history before it was a city.
If your picture of Newcastle Days is cars gleaming in the sun and kids bouncing on inflatables, that's a real picture. It's just a picture of the first five hours, not the whole day.
What Happens After the Cars Roll Out
Here's the part the flyer buries. The Cars on the Green Auto Show ends at 3 p.m. and the cars leave. But the festival, by its own schedule, keeps going until 7 p.m. That's four more hours after the day's most visible attraction has already cleared out.
What's left is a different kind of event. The Craft Beer & Wine Garden, hosted by the Greater Newcastle Chamber of Commerce, runs from 11 a.m. all the way to 7 p.m., meaning it's one of the few things spanning both halves of the day. Food vendors run on a similar late window. Main stage entertainment continues through the afternoon and into the evening, with a lineup built from local students, community members, and professional performers.
This is the version of Newcastle Days that rewards showing up late and staying. No auto show crowds, no line for the petting zoo, just a beer garden, food, and a stage that's still running. If you've ever driven past Lake Boren Park at 5 p.m. on Newcastle Days and wondered why it felt calmer than you expected for a citywide festival, this is why. Half the festival already went home.
The Booths Worth Slowing Down For
Between the two halves, a row of community booths runs for most of the day, and they're easy to walk past if you're chasing the cars or the kids' activities. They're also where the event's local character actually lives.
The Newcastle Arts Council and Newcastle Library run a hands-on art-making booth. The Newcastle Historical Society sets up alongside it with local history on display, a natural pairing with the Cemetery open house happening the same day. The Hazen and Liberty Robotics Teams bring working robots for kids to see up close, a detail that says something about the schools feeding into this community that a brochure never quite captures. None of these run on a hard schedule the way the auto show or the beer garden does. They're there most of the day, which means they're the easiest thing to fold into either half of your visit.
Why the Split Exists at All
Newcastle Days is held in September specifically to mark the city's official incorporation in 1994. It's not a summer send-off or a harvest festival borrowed from somewhere else. It's a birthday party for a city that's only three decades old, run largely by volunteers and local organizations rather than an outside events company. That volunteer structure is probably why the schedule reads the way it does: a morning built by people who wanted a car show and kids' activities, and an afternoon built by people who wanted a beer garden and live music, both bolted onto the same permit and the same park without much effort to blend them into one continuous experience.
That's not a criticism. It's useful information. A festival built by committee tends to have seams, and once you know where this one's seam is, you stop expecting one continuous vibe and start treating it as two options.
How to Pick Your Window
If you're deciding how to spend the day rather than trying to do all of it, the schedule sorts itself into three reasonable visits:
- Morning through early afternoon (10 a.m. to 3 p.m.) for the parade, the auto show, the petting zoo, pony rides, and the Cemetery open house. This is the version to bring young kids to, and the version to catch if seeing the cars is the actual point.
- Late afternoon into evening (3 p.m. to 7 p.m.) for the Craft Beer & Wine Garden, food vendors, and main stage entertainment without the crowds. This is the version for anyone who'd rather sit with a drink and listen to a local band than navigate a parking lot full of muscle cars.
- All day, if you don't mind the transition, treating the awards ceremony at 2:30 p.m. as your natural pivot point from one event to the other.
None of these is the correct way to do Newcastle Days. They're just different festivals wearing the same nine hours, and the only mistake is showing up expecting one continuous thing and being confused when half of it has already left.
Lake Boren Park does this kind of split-personality scheduling well precisely because Newcastle is small enough that a volunteer chamber of commerce and a handful of local clubs can run the whole thing without a professional events calendar smoothing over the edges. That's part of what makes it worth attending in the first place. You're not watching a produced show. You're watching a city throw itself a birthday party, seams and all.
If you're weighing a move to this part of the Eastside and want to know what daily life actually looks like here beyond one Saturday in September, the Newcastle neighborhood guide is a good next stop. For everything else, Andrew M. Wenzl is always glad to talk through what living in Newcastle is really like. Let's Connect.
