Redlands Bowl: Free Concerts Since Nineteen Twenty-Four

The Redlands Bowl has offered free outdoor concerts every summer since nineteen twenty-four. That is over a hundred consecutive seasons without a ticket price, which makes it one of the longest-running free outdoor concert series in the United States.

The bowl sits in a park donated to the city of Redlands by Alfred and Albert Smiley, the same brothers who built the grand public library two blocks away. The Smileys were Quakers from a New York family who came to California in the orange boom years, made money in citrus-adjacent real estate, and invested a significant portion of it back into the civic infrastructure of Redlands. Libraries, parks, education. The bowl was a natural amphitheater they developed for public use.

Redlands was the cultural anchor of the citrus-era Inland Empire. The wealth that the orange groves generated in the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundreds built Victorian houses, a university, and a set of civic institutions that outlasted the groves themselves. The bowl is the clearest survivor. The same benches, the same summer evenings, the same free admission that the orange-money donors intended a century ago. The groves are gone. The music remains.