Devonshire Downs
History
Devonshire Downs began life in 1946 as a harness-racing track on the northern edge of the San Fernando Valley, at the corner of Devonshire Street and Zelzah Avenue in Northridge. In 1948 the State of California bought the grounds (for roughly $140,000) and turned them over to the 51st District Agricultural Association as the home of the San Fernando Valley Fair — so by the 1960s the Downs was both a former racetrack and a working fairgrounds, a wide-open patch of dirt and grandstands sitting next to San Fernando Valley State College (renamed California State University, Northridge, in 1972).
It is remembered now for a single weekend. On June 20-22, 1969, the 24-year-old promoter Mark Robinson staged the Newport '69 Pop Festival there — three days, thirty-odd acts, and a crowd that overwhelmed the site. The violence and gate-crashing of that weekend saw to it that no rock festival was ever permitted at the Downs again. The college absorbed the land as its North Campus; the old fairground structures were demolished in 2001.
Its Place in the Scene
Devonshire Downs is not a San Francisco ballroom — it is a Los Angeles fairgrounds — and that is exactly why it earns a place in this chronicle for one weekend in June 1969. Newport '69 was, at that moment, plausibly the largest pop festival the country had yet seen, two months before Woodstock eclipsed it. It is the Southern California counterweight to the Bay Area scene: the same bands, the same summer, a far bigger and more chaotic crowd, and the dark preview of how 1969's festival mania would curdle — gate-crashing, a Sunday riot outside the fences, hundreds hurt. Held the weekend before the Jimi Hendrix Experience played its final show in Denver, it caught Hendrix at a hinge: a poor, possibly sabotaged Friday set, then a transcendent Sunday jam that an LA Times critic said may have been the best performance the audience would ever hear.