Austin: The Long Center for the Performing Arts

President Kennedy was supposed to eat dinner in this building. He never arrived — Dallas got in the way, on November 22, 1963.

Before it was the Long Center, the site at 701 W. Riverside Drive was Palmer Auditorium, Austin’s Municipal Auditorium since 1959 and renamed in 1981 for former mayor Lester E. Palmer. More than 5,000 Austinites had gathered there to welcome John F. Kennedy to a scheduled dinner on the evening of November 22, 1963 — a moment frozen by history before it could happen. Decades later, a $20 million lead gift from Austin couple Joe R. Long and Teresa Lozano Long helped fund a genuine adaptive-reuse renovation: roughly 95 percent of Palmer Auditorium’s original structure, including its aluminum roof panels and tons of steel, was recycled into the new Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Center for the Performing Arts, which opened to the public March 28–30, 2008, drawing some 15,000 visitors to its “Sneak Peek” open house.

A Home for Austin’s Resident Companies

The Long Center’s main stage, the Michael & Susan Dell Hall, seats 2,442 and takes its name from a separate $10 million gift by Michael and Susan Dell in 2001; the smaller Rollins Studio Theatre seats roughly 230, configurable down to about 80. The complex serves as the shared home of three Founding Resident Companies — the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Austin, and Austin Opera — while also hosting touring concerts, comedy, dance, and Broadway-style productions from around the world.

On the Water

Sitting directly on the shore of Lady Bird Lake with the downtown skyline as a backdrop, the Long Center’s outdoor gathering space is the City Terrace — currently branded, under naming rights, the H-E-B Terrace — together with the adjoining Hartman Concert Park, used for free and ticketed outdoor events looking out over the water. From honky-tonks like Billy Bob’s Texas to a grand performing-arts hall built from a half-century-old auditorium, Texas keeps finding new ways to fill a stage — and the Long Center is Austin’s answer for orchestras, opera, ballet, and everything in between.

I’ve been here ♪