Razing of the rock palace Winterland Ballroom
Considering it was one of the three greatest live popular music venues in San Francisco history, Winterland Ballroom went without much of a fight.
Legendary promoter Bill Graham shrugged his shoulders when he announced he was closing the 5,400-seat converted ice skating palace, which had hosted Led Zeppelin, the Who, Queen, the Rolling Stones and hundreds of Shipstads & Johnson Ice Follies presentations.
“The rumor I heard,” Graham told The Chronicle’s Joel Selvin in late 1978, “is that the building is being sold and converted into a racquet club.”
But it was never converted into anything. On the week of Sept. 17, 1985, with no protesters and very few witnesses, bulldozers cleared out the interior, and the wrecking ball razed the home of “The Last Waltz” and 59 Grateful Dead shows.
The Chronicle’s Datebook section ran one small photo with a three-paragraph eulogy.
“Winterland, the storied San Francisco arena that became the city’s cathedral of rock ’n’ roll during the 1960s and ’70s, is being demolished this week (photo at right) to make way for a $30 million, 304-unit apartment complex,” The Chronicle reported.
“The Last Waltz” concert at Winterland Nov. 25, 1976, was filmed by Martin Scorsese. Eric Clapton (left), Paul Butterfield, Bobby Charles, Ron Wood, and many other musicians performed.
But a more complete eulogy has been waiting, in visual form, in The Chronicle archives. Photographer Tom Levy documented the end of Winterland with dozens of previously unpublished photos, rediscovered during a search in 2017.
The complex, built in 1928 and bordered by Fillmore, Post, Pierce and Steiner streets, was an exhibition hall and skating rink originally called the New Dreamland Auditorium; generations of San Francisco children learned to skate on the rink.
It was considered run-down and in a bad neighborhood when Graham revived it in 1971 as a larger alternative for the Fillmore, a 1,150-capacity venue a couple of blocks away. In addition to every rock, soul and blues act that mattered in the next decade, Winterland hosted “The Last Waltz,” The Band’s Thanksgiving Day farewell performance in 1977, immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s movie.
Winterland puttered along for another year after that before Graham announced he was finished with the venue; closing with a legendary New Year’s Eve Grateful Dead show that may have been the band’s most coveted ticket in history.
“There is 100 times the demand than there are tickets,” Graham said, predicting they could have sold 500,000. “You may think I’ve gone off my rocker, but you haven’t seen the letters from Tokyo, New York, Boston, Miami asking if they can charter a plane for just 100 people, will they be able to get in?”
After that final eighthour party — with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers opening — there seemed to be little mourning. A Chronicle article in 1980 confirmed that the owners United Artists Theater Circuit Inc., which had leased the venue to Graham, were planning to raze the structure.
“We want the area upgraded,” Western Addition Neighborhood Association President Tip Hillin told the newspaper. “Most of us have lived here quite a long time. Winterland became a terrible slum building and the crowds were obnoxious. You’d have people waiting in line trying to steal rugs from the Catholic Church, using our yards as bathrooms, and sitting around drinking beer on the lawn of the mortuary.”
When the old Fox Theatre on Market Street was demolished in 1963, The Chronicle ran classified ads for weeks announcing sales and auctions. You can still find buildings and backyards in San Francisco with doors, chandeliers, sconces and statues from the movie palace.
Winterland died quietly, with comparatively little notice. But Levy’s photos offer a last look at the arena taking its final breath. An Ice Follies mural remains on the back of the building, with Snoopy skating in a winter cap.
Inside Winterland, a wall filled with concert posters has a hole in it, and the post-apocalyptic-looking interior of the ballroom can be seen. Venturing inside, with Levy taking photos from every angle, most but not all of the chairs have been torn out. Giant banks of lights hang precariously over the debris-strewn floor, where a bulldozer idles and a construction worker reads a novel (or a particularly big instruction manual).
And remnants of that last great concert remain, seven years later.
“THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A Grateful Dead CONCERT,” a bumper sticker reads.
It’s the last thing holding together the glass on a broken window.