In the early 2000s, the general manager of the company that owned Merriweather Post Pavilion compared trying to make the place profitable to selling ice cubes in the middle of winter. The amphitheater was aging and underfunded, and it sat on land in downtown Columbia, Maryland, that was worth more as development than as a concert venue. The owner, General Growth Properties, offered to sell it to Howard County on one condition: that it be converted into a much smaller enclosed theater.
Next July, Merriweather turns 60. It’s still an open-air amphitheater, it holds roughly 19,000 people, and for the past 22 years it’s been run by Seth Hurwitz and I.M.P., the independent Washington promoter behind the 9:30 Club, The Anthem, and The Atlantis.
The building was never meant for rock and roll. It opened on July 14, 1967, as the Columbia Pavilion of Music, a Frank Gehry design commissioned as the summer home of the National Symphony Orchestra, with Van Cliburn on the opening bill. Thirteen months later Jimi Hendrix played it in a rainstorm. In May 1969, The Who and Led Zeppelin shared a bill there. By the early 1970s the symphony vision had given way to the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Doors, and Bob Dylan, and generations of fans from Baltimore and Washington had learned to park at the Columbia mall and walk through Symphony Woods to get to the show. Animal Collective named a 2009 album after the place.
None of that history was enough to protect it.
A grassroots campaign called Save Merriweather formed in 2003, with Ian Kennedy among its co-founders, to stop the conversion plan. In 2004, I.M.P. was chosen to take over operations and programming.
Hurwitz had spent more than two decades turning the 9:30 Club into one of the most respected rooms in the country. He’d never run an amphitheater, and he was taking on one its own owner had written off. He went at it the way he’d gone at everything else: book shows worth seeing, take care of the artists, and fix what fans actually experience on a summer night. Concessions and bathrooms were upgraded, art installations went up on the grounds, and the lineups pulled the venue off the predictable summer-shed circuit. Starting in 2009, the Virgin Mobile FreeFest drew roughly 50,000 people a year with acts like LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, and Jack White. Attendance climbed, and the venue was taken seriously again. In 2013, Rolling Stone ranked Merriweather the fourth-best amphitheater in the United States.
The community kept its end up. In November 2016, the Howard Hughes Corporation transferred ownership of Merriweather and Symphony Woods to the Downtown Columbia Arts and Culture Commission, a nonprofit led by Kennedy. The following spring, in the venue’s 50th season, I.M.P. signed a 40-year lease to keep operating it through 2057.
A $55 million renovation was already underway and was finished in 2019. The stage house was rebuilt and the roof raised. A 50,000-square-foot backstage went in with private rooms, lounges, side-stage viewing platforms, and swimming pools for touring artists and crews. The SkyLawn, two grassy knolls raised 40 feet above the pavilion, gave lawn-ticket holders a view they’d never had. A rotating stage lets one act set up while another plays.
An artist on a summer amphitheater tour spends weeks rotating through sheds that look nearly identical. A venue with a pool behind the stage gives the band and crew a reason to get off the bus, and it becomes a place they ask for by name. Those requests shape routing, and routing shapes the lineup fans actually get. The pools are Hurwitz’s booking strategy dressed up as hospitality.
In the third quarter of 2023, Merriweather was the top-grossing amphitheater on Pollstar’s charts, with $20.3 million in gross receipts and more than 245,000 tickets sold. About 90 percent of its audience comes from outside Howard County, so those nights fill restaurants and hotels across the region.
Most large amphitheaters in the United States are owned or operated by Live Nation. Merriweather isn’t. When Hurwitz testified in the Live Nation antitrust trial this past March, he described competition for amphitheater promotion in his market as essentially “me and Live Nation.” Keeping a 19,000-capacity shed independent lets I.M.P. offer touring artists a complete path through the Washington region, from a 450-person club on 9th Street to a summer amphitheater in Columbia, without sending them to the competitor.
“We sell escapism,” Seth Hurwitz has said of his business. Merriweather is where that happens at the largest scale I.M.P. operates, and it came close to being shrunk into something else entirely. Twenty-two years later it has a rebuilt stage, a nonprofit owner, a lease that runs to its 90th birthday, and a summer calendar that sells.
When the anniversary arrives next July, it’ll be worth remembering the year its owner compared it to ice cubes in winter, and the independent promoter who took the job anyway.
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