Occupying a converted warehouse in the warehouse arts district on the edge of downtown Tucson, 191 Toole is a flexible live-music and events venue that takes its name directly from its address on East Toole Avenue. Operated by the same team behind the city's long-running Rialto Theatre, it was developed to give Tucson a mid-sized, general-admission room that could host touring bands as well as private functions, filling the gap between the city's small clubs and its larger theatres. The main ha.....

The University of Arizona's football cathedral is closing on its centennial under a new name. Casino Del Sol Stadium - Arizona Stadium for most of its life - opened on 12 October 1929 at 1 North National Championship Drive on the university campus in Tucson, and has grown from a modest horseshoe into one of the Southwest's iconic college venues, home to the Arizona Wildcats through nearly a hundred seasons of what is now Big 12 Conference football. The bowl was built in increments across the de.....

The University of Arizona's red-brick auditorium has been Tucson's main stage since the Roosevelt era. Centennial Hall at 1020 East University Boulevard opened on 22 April 1937 as simply "the Auditorium," designed by campus architect Roy Place - the man responsible for the university's signature red-brick look - and inaugurated with a two-hour program for 2,500 people that included a cantata called Land of Light, a Thornton Wilder one-act, ballet, football-game films and the crowd singing All Ha.....

The hotel that caught John Dillinger runs one of the longest-serving music rooms in the American West. Club Congress at 311 East Congress Street operates inside Hotel Congress, the 1919 railroad hotel facing Tucson's historic Southern Pacific depot, a building already famous before a note was played: in January 1934 a basement fire forced the evacuation of the third floor, two firefighters recognised the guests who had tipped them heavily to carry down suspiciously heavy luggage, and within days.....

Forty homeless people were living inside when the foundation bought the building for 250,000 dollars - a quarter-century of abandonment had nearly finished what the multiplex era started. The Fox Tucson Theatre at 17 West Congress Street opened on 11 April 1930 as a dual vaudeville and movie house, and it is the only known example of a Southwestern Art Deco - "Pueblo Deco" - movie palace anywhere. Architect M. Eugene Durfee dressed the 1,300-seat house in zig-zag deco fused with Pueblo motifs -.....

A University of Arizona professor won a naming contest in 1971 because the bar's manager looked like Grizzly Adams - whose TV co-star was a bear named Gentle Ben. Gentle Ben's Brewing Company, at 865 East University Boulevard in Tucson's Main Gate Square, has been the Wildcats' bar for more than half a century and gave the city its first craft brewery. The original Gentle Ben's operated from 1971 in a converted house at 841 North Tyndall Avenue - a spot now absorbed into a hotel lobby. Dennis a.....

A centrepiece of the Tucson Convention Center complex in downtown Tucson, the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall is the city's principal concert hall and a hub of its performing-arts life. Long known simply as the Music Hall, the venue was renamed in 2022 in honour of the celebrated singer and Tucson native, recognising one of the city's most famous daughters and adding her name to a hall that has served the region for decades. The auditorium seats around twenty-three hundred people across orchestra and.....

Arizona won 67 of its first 70 games in the building, then ran off 71 straight home wins between 1987 and 1992 - the tenth-longest streak in NCAA history. McKale Center, at 1 National Championship Drive on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson, opened on 1 February 1973 with a win over Wyoming and never looked back. The building fixed a competitive embarrassment: Bear Down Gym's 3,600 seats were the smallest in major-conference basketball, so the university raised an 8.1-million-dollar all.....

Ginger Rogers commandeered the star dressing room here in 1925, and her mother made sure she kept it. The Rialto Theatre at 318 East Congress Street in downtown Tucson opened on 29 August 1920 with the William S. Hart western The Toll Gate, built by William Curlett and Son jointly with the Hotel Congress across the street as one of the city's first movie houses and its leading vaudeville stage. The original room held about 1,000 across floor, mezzanine and balcony, with a 7,500-dollar Kilgen pi.....

The photo finish was invented here, on a rancher's backyard track. Rillito Park at 4502 North 1st Avenue in Tucson opened in 1943 on J. Rukin Jelks's stud farm along the Rillito River and is recognised as the birthplace of modern, formalised Quarter Horse racing - a 91-acre site now listed in its entirety on the National Register of Historic Places. Jelks and Melville Haskell used the track as a laboratory: the first three-eighths-mile straightaway - the chute system that became the world stand.....