On November 10th, the Heinz Field twitter account announced that Kenny Chesney and Eric Church will be holding concert this coming May. As we all know in the summer of 2013, Chesney held a concert at Heinz Field where his fans completely destroyed the parking lots with a ton of trash. I can honestly say that I am quite surprised that they are already allowing him to come back since this incident occured. But I just could not help but think to myself, ” What are they going to do to prevent this from happening?” or “Are the fans going to be more respectful of their surroundings this time?”
You can bet that I was not the only one who was thinking about this. Out of curiosity, I looked through some of the replies to this tweet; and while there were many people extremely excited for the upcoming concert, there were a few people who you could tell were still very bitter over the whole situation. There were many people to exclaim, “Oh no!” While one guy even went as far to say, “#PrayforPittsburgh.” While I am a Chesney fan, I cannot but help to also be a little concerned for the fate of the parking lots after this concert. History tends to repeat itself, so of course it is a little alarming that this horrible incident could happen again.
As we know, when Luke Bryan was announced to be playing a concert this past summer, changes were made to try and stop the trash buildup from happening again. This included limiting the time allowed in the parking lots and giving out trash and recycling bags. While these couple changes did help a little bit, the parking lots were still left pretty messy. Obviously these changes will also be implemented for the upcoming Chesney concert, but will this be any better than last year’s mess? Maybe they will issue even stricter rules? I am very interested in seeing what will happen. Hopefully I will be able to attend the concert, not only to see the performance, but also to be able to see if Chesney’s pregame fans are going to keep up their horrible reputation or change their ways to show respect for the venue and city.
One can only hope that it will be the latter. This kind of behavior is upsetting, because it leaves a horrible name for country music listeners and the city of Pittsburgh. A lot of people are already highly against country music, and this kind of thing is not making this genre of music look any better. Also, when people think of Pittsburgh, we do not want them to think we are just made up of a bunch of messy people. We were already given the reputation of the worst accent in the country; we do not want to be known as slobs too. Hopefully, we will be surprised when May rolls around that the parking lots will be nearly as clean after the concert as they were before it happens. However until then, there will be much speculation and not much faith that the mess will be any better.
Heinz Field Concerts 