A Friday rainstorm forced Hamilton event organizers to scrap the planned solo performance by Ozzy Osbourne tribute act Ozzmosis at RiversEdge Amphitheater, pushing the rock show to Saturday night and folding it directly into The Very Best Fest, the city's unofficial Pokémon-themed weekend at Marcum Park. What started as two separate events on the summer calendar became one combined evening of costumed trainers, a movie screening and guitar riffs echoing off the Great Miami River.
According to the RiversEdge Facebook page, the reschedule meant Ozzmosis now shared the schedule with a screening of Detective Pikachu at Marcum Park on Saturday, along with the rest of the festival's planned activities. The event, first detailed in a post from City of Hamilton, Ohio - City Hall, welcomed “trainers of all ages” to the park for what organizers billed as a night blending pop-culture nostalgia with live rock and roll.
The Very Best Fest itself leaned heavily into its Pokémon theme well beyond the movie screening. Travel Butler County promoted a family-friendly Bug Catching Contest that wound through Marcum Park, along with custom keychain crafts hosted by Lane Libraries and hidden Poké Balls scattered across downtown that were redeemable for prizes at Pinball Garage, per the same account.
A Bar Crawl Adds a Grown-Up Layer Downtown
While families chased virtual monsters through the park, Downtown Hamilton launched its own weekend-long Gym Badge Challenge Bar Crawl the same day, encouraging festivalgoers to pick up passport lanyards and collect themed badges at 12 participating establishments across the downtown core. Municipal Brew Works and Pinball Garage were among the venues offering themed badges and drink specials through the weekend, according to Downtown Hamilton. The pairing of a daytime family festival with a nighttime crawl reflects how the city's business groups have tried to capture both audiences in a single weekend.
From Abandoned Hospital to National Award-Winner
The setting for all this has its own backstory. Marcum Park sits on a six-acre brownfield site that once held Mercy Hospital, which operated downtown from 1899 until it relocated in 2006, according to Ohio Magazine. A $3.5 million donation from Joe and Sarah Marcum later enabled construction of the park that now bears their name.
That investment paid off in national recognition. The American Planning Association named RiversEdge at Marcum Park one of five “Great Public Spaces” on its 2018 Great Places in America list, citing the site's environmental remediation and its role as an urban economic catalyst, per Plan Hamilton. The free summer concert series held at the amphitheater typically draws crowds of 1,000 to 3,000 people per event and relies primarily on corporate and local business sponsorships to remain free to the public.
Riverfront Park Keeps Fueling Downtown Growth
The park's ripple effects extend into Hamilton's real estate market. Development around Marcum Park has helped drive projects including the $16 million Marcum Apartments complex in 2018 and the $8 million COhatch coworking and event venue built inside a historic 1931 bank building, which Hoodline previously reported opened this past May. City infrastructure investment has followed suit — Hamilton secured regional grant funding from the OKI Regional Council of Governments in October 2025 to build a trail link connecting Marcum Park and RiversEdge to the Black Street Bridge, tying the park into the broader Beltline Trail and Great Miami River Recreational Trail network.
This is not the first time Hamilton has used the park and amphitheater to anchor a themed weekend. In July, the city hosted an Independence Day celebration at Marcum Park featuring a morning parade, an evening RiversEdge concert by KISS tribute band Mr. Speed, and riverfront fireworks. The Very Best Fest follows that same playbook of stacking family programming, live music and vendor activity along the riverfront into a single event.
Not every recent chapter at Marcum Park has been about festivals and fireworks. State authorities were still reviewing, as of March, a June 2025 arrest at the park after body-camera video captured a Hamilton police sergeant striking a suspect 41 times with a baton, an incident that occurred after officers found the person inside the park past closing time. The review remains a separate thread from this summer's event programming, but it underscores that the same public space carries both a celebrated civic identity and unresolved questions about after-hours security.
