The Van Buren:
Downtown Phoenix is about to add another music venue.
What does the opening next week of the Van Buren — Crescent Ballroom owner Charlie Levy’s new venture with Live Nation — mean for downtown Phoenix?
“It means everything,” says Terry Burke, president of Southwest music at Live Nation, which has partnered with Levy and Stateside Presents on the 1,900-capacity venue.
Housed in a 20,000square-foot building on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Van Buren Street in what was once the Phoenix Motor Company, this venue “fills a niche,” Burke says.
“You went from Valley Bar to Crescent to Comerica,” he says. “That was a big leap. Obviously, the Marquee is a viable venue and it fits that niche. But it’s not downtown.”
Levy’s venues, built in partnership with Tucker Woodbury, have played a huge role in establishing downtown as a bustling entertainment destination. Crescent Ballroom opened in October 2011, followed in 2015 by Valley Bar. In 2014, Levy launched a thriving multivenue music festival called Viva PHX.
The Van Buren has nearly four times the capacity of Crescent Ballroom, which is twice as big as Valley Bar.
“It’s exciting to be part of the downtown fabric,” Levy says. “It’s almost starting to become the epicenter of live music and the arts, especially when you combine not only places like Valley Bar and Crescent, which we’re part of, but obviously with Comerica and the Orpheum, Talking Stick Resort Arena, the Pressroom, Monarch, Trunk Space, Last Exit Live, the Lost Leaf, you start adding all of that together and it starts becoming something special, where people can literally get on their bike or even walk to all these different places for live music.”
And what makes it “kind of fun,” he says, “is if you think about it, you can start off playing Trunk Space, then your next show can be Valley Bar, then Crescent. The next show, you’re playing Van Buren, then Comerica and Talking Stick. How cool is that?”
Downtown Phoenix obviously had live music long before the opening of Crescent Ballroom.
It’s been 25 years since Talking Stick Resort Arena (known at the time as America West Arena) held its first event, a George Strait concert. Comerica Theatre, formerly the Dodge, has been around for 15 years. And as Levy recalls, “When I was a young lad, we had the Silver Dollar Club, Modified Arts and places like that, the Hub.”
Levy’s venues are just part of what he labels “a resurgence of downtown in general.”
As Burke says, “Phoenix never really had much of a downtown for many years and then the arena was built. Then the ball park came and the biggest catalyst was ASU. When the campus came to downtown Phoenix, that opened the door for more people to live down here. And having bars and restaurants and soon a grocery store makes what most major cities have, which is a downtown.
“It’s great that Valley Bar, Crescent, the Van Buren and Comerica are all within walking distance of each other, basically. But that was all organic. It wasn’t the city of Phoenix that said, ‘Hey, let’s make a music entertainment district.’ It was Charlie opening the Crescent, then the Valley Bar, which happened to be in the building that his office is in.”
Working with Live Nation on his latest move has been “super-exciting,” Levy says.
“They bring so much to the table,” he says. “Tucker and I, we have our thing and we do what we do well. But bringing those guys in, Terry Burke and everyone in the Phoenix office and the L.A. office, they bring another dimension of professionalism and best practices. They’re all really good people with great music backgrounds. It’s been a learning experience for our team to work with their team. The whole goal is to make the best music venue possible for the fans and for the bands and for the city. And if we can work really hard together to do that, it’s a win-win-win.”
Levy’s relationship with the staff at Live Nation, including Burke, stretches back to his days as an intern at Danny Zelisko’s Evening Star Presents, which was sold in 2001 to SFX, which was sold to Clear Channel, which then spun off into Live Nation.
“I’ve worked with those guys since I was a teenager,” Levy says. “We’ve done shows at Comerica for years. They’ve brought shows to Crescent for years. Now, we’re working together on the Van Buren and I’m superexcited. Working with Live Nation and a lot of the Crescent team and the Valley Bar team, it’s like we got the band back together, added some awesome new players and now we’re forging ahead.”
He and Burke first looked at the Van Buren building (and the Circle Records building) in early 2014.
“Charlie and I have known each since the early ‘90s and we’ve done shows together since he worked for us and at Nita’s Hideaway,” Burke says. “It’s not like one day I thought, ‘Oh, let’s go find out who this Charlie is.’ But once he got to that level where he wanted to open a bigger club than Crescent, we started looking at different locations.”
So what gave the space on the corner of Fourth and Van Buren the edge?
Levy answers, “As they say, location, location, location. I mean, being right downtown, right next to Comerica, right next to Crescent, right next to the Orpheum, on Van Buren, it’s pretty primo, right? And then on top of that, it’s an awesome historic building on the Phoenix historic registry and we were fortunate enough to make it a music, arts and events space for the people of Phoenix.”
New construction is less expensive, Levy says. “But there’s something about taking the framework and the guts of this awesome old building and molding it into a new space. There’s just something special about that and it works every time. You take something with history and character and rehab it, it usually comes out pretty special. Even an idiot like me couldn’t mess it up.”
Of course, the likelihood that Levy would have messed this up is pretty slim, considering his successes.
As Burke sums it up, “He took Crescent, which was this old historic building and made it into a great music room. Then, he takes Valley Bar, which is the basement of an office building, and makes this great underground bar scene and music room. And then he converts the Van Buren from this old car dealership from the ‘20s, and I think people are gonna be blown away.
“I think people will go to the Van Buren because it’s a really cool room, not just because so and so is on the stage. I think that’s the kind of room it’ll be, where you’ll go, ‘I don’t really know this band. I’ve kind of heard of them. But it’s playing the Van Buren? Let’s go.’ ”