The Regency Ballroom is one of San Francisco’s primary concert venues, in a landmark building more than a century old at Van Ness and Sutter. Its Beaux-Arts Grand Ballroom has thirty-five-foot ceilings and twenty-two turn-of-the-century chandeliers, and it holds about 1,400 people standing or around 700 seated. Concerts are operated by Goldenvoice, the promoter behind Coachella.
A Masonic temple
The building was constructed as the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, with its opening dated to 1909 by some sources and 1911 by others. The Beaux-Arts auditorium and its lodge room, which still has its original pipe organs from 1909, served the Masons for roughly six decades.
From temple to movie theater
In the mid-1960s the temple was sold to Blumenfeld Enterprises and converted into an 800-seat movie house, which opened as the Regency I on December 22, 1967. It was a major first-run theater for about thirty years, showing hits such as Star Trek and Raiders of the Lost Ark, before closing on November 7, 1998.
Next door to the Avalon
The Regency sits beside the site of the Avalon Ballroom, the 1960s San Francisco psychedelic rock hall where the city’s counterculture bands played. That building later became a movie theater, the Regency II.
A concert hall again
San Francisco real estate professional Scott Robertson bought the dormant building in 2000, restored it, and reopened it as the Regency Center in March 2002. It hosted corporate events, weddings and a handful of concerts at first. When the Warfield closed for renovations in 2008, shows moved to the Grand Ballroom, and Goldenvoice began operating the venue that fall. Today it books touring acts year-round, and a general-admission Social Hall in the basement hosts smaller shows.
