Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

Austin's beloved upstairs room got locked out of Sixth Street and reinvented itself in an 1800s granary. The Parish opened in 2003 on the second floor of 214 East 6th Street, and across two decades became one of the city's most respected mid-size stages - a room with famously good sound in the heart of the historic entertainment district, passing from founder-era ownership through ATX Brands' Doug Guller (who once listed it on eBay) to Heard Entertainment, the independent promoter behind Empire Control Room and Garage, in 2018. The Sixth Street chapter ended abruptly in October 2021 when the building's landlord changed the locks amid a rent dispute, boarding the windows with shows still booked into the next year and triggering a lawsuit from the venue's owners. The rebirth took shape within days. Heard partnered with booking agency Resound Presents to relocate the operation - rebranded simply Parish - across Interstate 35 to 501 Brushy Street, the storied East Austin building that began life in the nineteenth century as a granary, spent the 1970s and 80s as soundstages where Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan shot videos and scenes of the film Raggedy Man were made, and later hosted the North Door music venue until the pandemic closed it. The new Parish opened in March 2022 on a ten-year lease, with the adjoining bar and listening lounge My Oh My completing the complex. The Brushy Street room carried the brand's virtues forward - a genre-spanning calendar of indie, hip-hop, electronic and Latin acts, promoter-friendly economics and that carefully tuned sound - while the walkable East Fifth Street district grew up around it. In May 2025 Parish announced it would leave Brushy Street in turn, citing rising expenses, playing out its summer and fall calendar while hunting a third home - the venue name outliving yet another address, as Austin institutions increasingly must.