Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Ninety-five percent of a demolished city auditorium lives on inside Austin's grandest concert hall - right down to the circular ring beam that now crowns its lakeside terrace. The Michael and Susan Dell Hall is the principal venue of the Long Center for the Performing Arts at 701 West Riverside Drive, opened in 2008 on the south shore of Lady Bird Lake. The site's story begins with the 1959 Municipal Auditorium, renamed the Lester E. Palmer Auditorium in 1981 for the former mayor; when the city's symphony, opera and ballet found themselves without a suitable permanent home in the late 1990s, they united as Arts Center Stage and won a 1998 referendum to lease and transform the ageing hall. Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long gave 20 million dollars in 1999, naming the centre; Michael and Susan Dell added 10 million in 2001, naming the hall. When the economy stalled the original Skidmore, Owings and Merrill design, the project was rescoped in 2003 into a leaner phased build - and its architects turned demolition into material supply, recycling roughly 95 percent of Palmer Auditorium including its foundation and the distinctive ring beam, re-erected as an open-air colonnade framing downtown skyline views. Dell Hall seats 2,442 across orchestra, parterre, mezzanine and balcony levels that wrap the side walls as boxes, with the old Palmer stage house - one of the largest in Texas - preserved behind the proscenium. It serves as home stage for the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Austin Opera and Ballet Austin, layered with touring Broadway, headline concerts, comedy and the centre's own presentations. The smaller Rollins Studio Theatre and the later-added Topfer stage complete the campus, while the H-E-B Terrace under the ring beam has become one of Austin's signature photo spots, looking across the lake to the skyline. For a city that sells itself as the live music capital of the world, the Long Center is the formal counterweight - the place where Austin puts on its best clothes, in a hall built quite literally from the bones of its civic past.