Caamp at Forest Hills Stadium: The Transfer Is Part of the Plan

Every city is a federation of villages, and Forest Hills is the village that happens to own a 13,000-seat concrete amphitheater. That fact changes how you should think about Thursday, July 23, when Caamp — the Columbus, Ohio band built around Taylor Meier's sanded-down tenor and Evan Westfall's banjo — plays the stadium with Mon Rovîa and Hannah Cohen opening. This is not a review of the band. Their fifth record, Copper Changes Color, came out in June 2025 and will do its own persuading. This is a plan for the room, the blocks around the room, and the train that gets you out of it — because at Forest Hills, the room is a residential neighborhood, and the neighborhood sets the rules.

The stadium sits inside Forest Hills Gardens, a planned Tudor-brick enclave that has been negotiating its relationship with amplified music since the 1960s. The venue was designed in the 1920s as the home of the U.S. Open; Sinatra, Dylan and the Rolling Stones played it in its first concert era, and a 2013 renovation brought it back as the only outdoor venue of its size in the city. The neighbors never left. That tension produced the two facts that should organize your whole evening: there is no parking, and the sound goes off at 10pm.

Caamp plays Forest Hills Stadium, 1 Tennis Place, Forest Hills, Queens, on Thursday, July 23, 2026. Doors at 5pm, music at 6pm, all ages. Mon Rovîa and Hannah Cohen open. Tickets are sold through the venue's official channels, with resale listings starting around $110, and $1 from every ticket goes to The Great Heights Movement, the charitable fund Caamp set up in 2022. The show ends by 10pm. Plan for sun until roughly 8:15, then a fast Queens dusk.

Take the E, F, M or R to Forest Hills–71st Avenue. The E and F run express from Manhattan; from Midtown you are looking at roughly twenty minutes. Exit toward 71st Avenue/Continental Avenue, cross Queens Boulevard, and walk south — the street narrows, the brick turns Tudor, and in about ten minutes you pass under the Station Square arches and follow Burns Street to the stadium entrance. The station has an elevator on the south side of Queens Boulevard between 70th Road and 71st Avenue if you need step-free access.

The Forest Hills LIRR stop deposits you practically on top of Station Square — the walk to the gate is a few minutes at most. Two logistics notes worth more than any seat upgrade: the station has a ramp but no elevator, and the venue advises boarding one of the first four cars of the train so you exit at the right end of the platform. From Penn Station or Grand Central it is one short ride, and on the way home the westbound platform will be the calmest option in the neighborhood.

There is no parking at the venue, and the residential streets around it are closed to event parking. The venue is blunt about this, and so am I: do not drive to Forest Hills Gardens. If someone is dropping you off, the corner of 71st–Continental Avenue and Queens Boulevard is the designated taxi and rideshare point on event days; streets closer to the gate shut down.

Doors at 5pm on a Thursday means most of the crowd arrives straight from work, which makes the 4-to-6pm window on Austin Street and Station Square the real social hour of the night.

Expect flannel in July: couples who discovered By and By during lockdown, groups of friends in their late twenties carrying canned wine logic, a healthy contingent of parents introducing teenagers to banjo music, and Forest Hills locals who treat stadium nights as their block's recurring festival. Caamp draws a crowd that sings quietly and means it.

Off the train by 4:15. Start at Nick's Pizza on Ascan Avenue — an old-school room that has been turning out thin, well-charred pies for more than twenty years; they sell whole pies, not slices, so bring at least one other person. Walk it off along Austin Street, then cut down to Station Square for one round at Dirty Pierre's, the small bar a few steps from the stadium gate where concert posters cover the walls and the pre-show line forms early. Exit point: the Burns Street gate, five minutes away, in time for the 6pm start if you want Mon Rovîa — and you do.

• Dirty Pierre's — 13 Station Square; the closest bar to the gate, burgers and memorabilia, arrives at capacity early.

• Nick's Pizza — 108-26 Ascan Avenue; thin-crust whole pies only, a neighborhood institution, pre-show rather than post-show (it closes at 9).

• Forest Hills Station House — 106-11 71st Avenue; a gastropub with a long craft list, open past midnight on Thursdays, which makes it the after-show plan.

• Agora Taverna — 70-09 Austin Street; Greek seafood for a proper sit-down dinner, though it closes around 10pm, so it only works before the show.

• Tacombi / Austin Street Pizza — Austin Street; the fast options when you are running behind: tacos or a square slice, no reservation, no ceremony.

The stadium is a horseshoe of 1920s concrete open to the sky, with flags on the rim and the Gardens' oak canopy showing over the top rows. There is no roof and very little shade, so a 6pm July start means two hours of golden-hour sun on the eastern stands before the light drops behind the stage. The sound, after years of neighbor-driven engineering — the operators have spent millions on mitigation, down to soundproofing the stairwells — is tighter and more contained than an open bowl has any right to be.

Two seating realities worth knowing before you buy or upgrade. The reserved sections are metal benches, mostly without backs; seat-back rentals exist, and regulars treat them as essential rather than optional. General admission puts you on the floor, standing, where the energy concentrates — for a band like Caamp, whose sets move between hushed fingerpicking and full-band swells, the floor rewards people who like to be inside the sound, while the upper benches reward people who like to watch a sunset hit 13,000 heads at once. Neither choice is wrong; one of them involves your lower back.

Forest Hills Stadium sits closer to private homes than any comparable venue in the city, and the arrangement that keeps concerts running is a hard 10pm stop — the sound system goes off on schedule, a fact that has been litigated, protested and negotiated between the operators and the Gardens' residents for years. For you, this is mostly good news. The show will not drift past your last reasonable train. Caamp will be offstage by 10, encore included.

• Buy merch when gates open, not after the encore. With a 10pm hard stop there is no leisurely post-show browse; the lines compress into the exits immediately.

• Skip the rideshare after the show entirely. Surge pricing meets closed streets at 71st and Queens Boulevard; the subway or a Station House hour will beat the car every time.

You are in Forest Hills anyway, so let us dispense with the landmarks honestly:

1. Station Square — the brick arches and the vine-covered Tudor tower are genuinely worth the two minutes of photography everyone gives them. They were built to make a garden suburb feel like an English market town, and they still do the trick at golden hour.

2. The stadium facade from Dartmouth Street — the arched concrete flank with its eagle finials reads more Roman ruin than concert venue. Locals walk past it daily; you get one evening with it.

3. Austin Street — a perfectly serviceable commercial strip that every guide will oversell to you. Eat there, then move on.

4. The Forest Hills Gardens lampposts — yes, they are picturesque. No, the private streets do not want you parking on them, photographing into windows, or lingering past the curfew you just watched shut down a rock concert.

Take the E or F home. The transfer, as ever, is part of the plan.