Venue to host mix of national, regional, local musicians
Stable Hall, the new performance venue at Pearl, was designed to give 21st-century audiences a good experience while also honoring the history of the space.
“We’re humble stewards of this room,” said W. Brandt Wood, whose Dallas-based company WoodHouse is the concept developer, operator and partner behind the space’s transformation. “This is a 130-year-old building that everybody loves. It is with kid gloves that we approached this project.”
A guiding idea as the one-time horse stable was transformed was to make sure that it was a distinctly San Antonio space. That extended to the artists who are being booked. It’s a mix of national, regional and local musicians who play all kinds of genres.
“All the local bands that are there show how important local programming is to this venue,” Wood said. “We would not have opened a big room with just touring shows. We absolutely have total commitment to our local community, the artists, the music patrons, and there’s no better way to represent that than to book the artists and to book them regularly.”
They’re also being presented the same way as every other band that plays the space.
“They’re not going to get the early nights of the week or the afternoon plays,” Wood said. “We’re going to hold these shows as important as anything else. That’s how we’re going to approach it.”
The space accommodates up to 1,000 people, making it comparable in size to Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, which has a capacity of 800.
Its jewel box stage, wood floors and ceiling and other visual touches are intended to evoke Texas’ historic dance halls.
Stable Hall is the newest identity for the building, which was built in the late 19th century. The name is a nod to its original purpose: It was built as a stable to house the Pearl Brewery’s draft horses in the days before motorized vehicles. When horses were no longer needed to transport the brewery’s suds, it became a Western-themed hospitality space dubbed The Corral. It closed around the time of HemisFair ’68, and three years later, it got a makeover and reopened as the Jersey Lilly, a space with a Gay ’90s theme that included red flocked wallpaper and brass chandeliers.
When Pearl began operating as a mixed-use development, a project that started in 2001, the space became Pearl Stable. The rental space was used for weddings, graduations and all kinds of meetings. At the time, the Pearl complex was just being developed, and so the hall gave folks who might not otherwise have set foot there a reason to go and check it out.
By 2020, Pearl was one of the city’s busiest destinations. And so, the time seemed right to set the stage for a new chapter.
Musician Rosie Flores, a San Antonio native based in Austin, is excited to be part of it. She has helped promote the new venue over the past three years, and she and her band the Talismen will share a bill with the West Texas Exiles on Feb. 28.
“They really have an agenda of highlighting Texas artists, which means a lot to us,” Flores said.
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