The Warehouse dedicated to offering live music
Where once there were rolls of carpet and mats, Erik Dickson envisions the future home of a thriving music venue.
Warehouse Concert Hall is planning to launch this fall in the former Wally Wemnant Carpet Market in downtown St. Catharines.
Managed by Dickson of Indoor Shoes Music concert promotions, the venue at the corner of Geneva and Court Streets is a stone’s throw away from the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.
Dickson said the city can sustain another stage.
“If you look at other cities in Ontario that are of similar size or even smaller, most of these cities have at least one or two dedicated venues,” he said, noting Waterloo has a couple of venues but doesn’t have a local music community as active as in St. Catharines and Niagara.
“There’s so much going on here that there’s plenty of activities to sustain a venue. We’ve been doing it with Detour for the last couple of years and our hope is really to build on that.”
Dickson said programming at The Warehouse will also differ from the performing arts centre, where there are two music venues with seating and one open space designed for dance and performance.
“There isn’t necessarily space where a rock band would play or a punk band would play or a metal band would play,” Dickson said. “I wouldn’t say it’s in competition with the performing arts centre. It’s more complementary to, so we’re sort of filling that gap where a lot of these other things wouldn’t necessarily be able to happen.”
Plus, Dickson said the performing arts centre is a state-of-theart facility so it has expenses that make it pricey for independent artists or for the average event.
Indoor Shoes put on about 100 concerts over the last year in bars and night clubs but Dickson said there hasn’t been a dedicated live music space in the city for the 10 years he’s been here and even before.
The Warehouse will be licenced for events, but it won’t have a kitchen or be open as a bar at other times.
“This will be a dedicated live music venue. So while other things will happen in the space, the hope is we can do lots of different things, the focus is live music first and foremost,” Dickson said.
“With that in mind, the hope is to really enhance the experience that people get seeing a band or an artist in a venue.”
The goal is to lure other groups and companies to rent out the space during the day for classes such as yoga, dance or zumba. The location could also be used in evenings by clubs and groups for socials and events when there aren’t scheduled concerts.
The concert hall is taking up 2,500 square feet of the Wally Wemnant building and should hold 220 people for concerts.
Dickson was worried he wouldn’t find a suitable space downtown because a lot of vacancies are retail-oriented with long, narrow storefronts.
He lucked out with the Wally Wemnant building which a big, open rectangular space with slightly higher ceilings ready to be renovated. It also has a dedicated parking lot for bands to use for unloading their equipment, along with patrons.
The space is a blank slate for Dickson, a graphic designer by day, to create the perfect concert space, a freedom he didn’t expect. He’ll be able to decide where everything goes from the stage to the washrooms.
“The challenge is designing a space that’s unique enough that has character but not themed,” he said.
The Warehouse is aiming to open at the end of October. Dickson has acts booked for November and would like to host them in the new space.
He wants to keep it simple. It opens up a lot of possibilities for other people to do their own events for different disciplines.
“We have a stage and a sound system and an open floor that lends to a lot of different things. Bring in seating or bring in chairs and all of a sudden you’ve got another type of event you can do,” Dickson said.
“There’s an unlimited amount of possibilities to what an be done.”