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

The Egyptian Room was dressed in hieroglyphics before King Tut's tomb made them fashionable. When Helen Eaton Jacoby worked with architects Rubush and Hunter on a grand ballroom addition to Indianapolis's Murat Shrine, she chose motifs copied from ancient palaces and tombs near Thebes - and while the room was under construction in November 1922, Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun's tomb and made her design the height of style. The room opened on 15 December 1922, one of the earliest Egyptian Revival interiors in the country. It sits inside the Old National Centre at 502 North New Jersey Street, the former Murat Shrine Temple built in 1909 to Oscar D. Bohlen's Middle Eastern-inflected design, all banded brick, minarets and stained glass. The building is the only Shrine temple in the world with a French-derived name - after Bir Murat, a Nubian desert oasis named for one of Napoleon's generals - and its 1910 theatre is the oldest surviving stage house in downtown Indianapolis, host to everything from Broadway tours to a 1932 Winston Churchill speech. Today the complex is a Live Nation-operated music hall, and the Egyptian Room is its concert workhorse: a 2,000-capacity ballroom on the upper level whose painted columns, winged-sun friezes and pharaonic murals give rock, hip-hop, metal and electronic tours one of the most distinctive rooms on the mid-size circuit. The 2,500-seat Murat Theatre downstairs takes the seated shows, with Corinthian Hall and smaller rooms filling out nine event spaces. The Shriners still own the building and keep offices in it, a continuity running back over a century; the venue name has tracked bank sponsorships since the 1990s, settling on Old National Centre in 2010. Renovations have modernised production and amenities while leaving the 1922 decorative scheme intact - the point of the room is that it does not look like anywhere else. For showgoers the practicalities are easy: the building sits at Michigan and New Jersey Streets on the northeast edge of downtown Indianapolis, a ten-minute walk from Mass Ave's restaurant row, with surface lots surrounding it. Floors are general admission for most Egyptian Room dates, and the balcony rail spots reward an early arrival.