California built its state fair a permanent Disney-inflected campus on the American River. Cal Expo - formally the California Exposition and State Fair - opened in July 1968 at 1600 Exposition Boulevard in Sacramento, when Governor Ronald Reagan cut the ribbon on the 350-acre grounds he had dedicated the year before. The move ended six decades at the old Stockton Boulevard fairgrounds, which had hosted the fair since 1909; the state had bought the riverside land as far back as 1948 and chartered.....

Sacramento's missing middle venue finally arrived, built from the ground up by the promoter behind Outside Lands. Channel 24 at 1800 24th Street in Midtown opened on 24 April 2025 with a Tucker Wetmore show, the first property entirely conceived, designed and executed by Another Planet Entertainment - the Bay Area independent whose portfolio spans the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Oakland's Fox Theater, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, The Independent, the Castro Theatre and the Outside Lands festival.....

It opened as a cafe in 1982, named for 1930s Hollywood bombshell Jean Harlow - and grew into the venue where Sacramento sees tomorrow's headliners at club range. Harlow's, at 2708 J Street in Midtown Sacramento, is the city's defining independent music venue: an art-deco room holding around 530 that has run continuously for over four decades. The evolution was organic - cafe to restaurant to supper club to full-time venue - and the booking history reads like a who's-next list that kept being ri.....

The stadium that proved Sacramento was a soccer city went up in a matter of months on the state fairgrounds. Heart Health Park at 1600 Exposition Boulevard, on the Cal Expo grounds, opened on 20 June 2014 as Bonney Field, a roughly 3-million-dollar, 8,000-seat pop-up built at speed for Sacramento Republic FC's debut USL season - and the club promptly sold out every remaining home date on its way to winning the 2014 USL championship in the stadium's first year. The formula was deliberately simple.....

Phil Collins packed 20,000 people into this college stadium in 1992, the same summer a World League football team pushed its crowds past 26,000 - not bad for a ground that opened with 6,000 temporary seats. Hornet Stadium, at 6000 J Street on the California State University, Sacramento campus, has been the city's big outdoor stage since 20 September 1969. The stadium replaced old Campus Stadium and stayed modest until professional football forced its growth: the Sacramento Surge of the World Le.....

Keith Richards was nearly electrocuted on this stage in 1965, and the building has outlived nearly everything else in downtown Sacramento. The Sacramento Memorial Auditorium at 1515 J Street, filling the block between 15th and 16th and I and J Streets, opened on 22 February 1927 as a memorial to the local servicemen who died in the Spanish-American War and World War I - which is why its five double front doors were built without locks, the lobby originally intended as an open shrine. City archit.....