Asbury Underground Returns In June

The Asbury Underground Downtown Art and Music Crawl, a much-loved city tradition which fills the streets of downtown Asbury Park with FREE concerts, comedy shows and poetry readings, will be held again this year for the first time since 2019. This year's crawl will be held on Saturday, June 15 from noon to 7 PM.  

The event returns to Asbury Park as a feature of the Prudential presents North to Shore Festival, New Jersey's three-week, three-city celebration of arts and ideas. North to Shore, produced by NJPAC, will offer concerts and events across Asbury Park June 10 to June 16.

This year's Asbury Underground art and music crawl will include approximately 100 performances — highlighting the work of over 200 musicians and some 50 visual artists, plus scores of poets and comedians, at 33 different venues, including stages dedicated to jazz, spoken word poetry and comedy.  

Visitors following the crawl map to all of the event's stages and venues will travel across the city's downtown, into art galleries, coffeehouses, clothing stores, restaurants and other spaces; each stop along the way will offer a display or a performance by an area artist.

 “The whole idea, from the inception of Asbury Underground, was to bring a broader awareness of just how fertile, in all of the arts, our city truly is,” says the founder and producer of Asbury Underground, Patrick Schiavino, a local artist and the owner of art629 Gallery. “It is really heartwarming how everyone pitches in to make this all happen. It is an amazing celebration of who we are as a community.”

“North to Shore's mission is to turn a spotlight on all the artists and creatives who make New Jersey such a uniquely vibrant place, and Asbury Underground brings so many of them together in one place, at one time. We're so pleased to be part of bringing back this Asbury Park tradition that celebrates this city's incredibly deep artistic bench,” says John Schreiber, President and CEO of NJPAC, which is producing North to Shore.

The crawl begins simultaneously at three different venues downtown at noon: art629 Gallery, 629 Cookman Avenue, Over the Moon Art Studios, 808 Springwood Avenue, and at Lock and Shade Courtyard, Court Square, 608-612 Cookman Avenue. Patrons can progress through the downtown, from any of these three locations, for the rest of the afternoon; performances are scheduled to begin at venues along the path every 15 minutes. All Asbury Underground events are free.  

 This year's crawl features several special events including:

 The Joe Harvard Memorial Stage: A specially curated stage of performers in memory of local musician, artist, author, and “personality” Joe Harvard, an original member of the Asbury Underground crew and recent inductee to the Asbury Angels Hall of Fame. The music will start at 12:30 PM and run till 6 PM at Parlor Gallery, 717 Cookman Avenue. Harvard established The gARTen, a community black-light art garden and gallery, in a vacant lot on the Cookman Avenue corridor. It served as an Asbury Underground performance space for many years.  

Quills and Chills: A Supernatural Soiree with Poe, Crowley, and Yeats, a spoken word event with a mystic flavor, curated by poet Robert Goodman, at The Paranormal Museum, 621 Cookman Avenue, beginning at 4PM.  

The Literally Underground Comedy Show, curated and hosted by comedian Jess Alaimo, will be held in the (surprisingly spacious) basement of Cookman Avenue Italian restaurant Capitoline, from 2 to 3:30 PM. The restaurant is at 639 Cookman Avenue

. A schedule and a map of the crawl route for visitors to follow will be available at the Asbury Underground website, asburyunderground.com. 

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