Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

The theatre opened one week after the 1929 stock market crash - and 95 years later it emerged from a 125-million-dollar rebuild as one of America's most advanced concert halls. Jacobs Music Center, at 750 B Street in downtown San Diego, is the home of the San Diego Symphony: born the Fox Theatre in 1929, renamed Copley Symphony Hall in 1985, and reopened in its current form on 28 September 2024. William Fox's San Diego movie palace, by architects Weeks and Day, was the grandest thing the city had seen - 3,000 seats of Spanish Rococo splendour that reigned as the premier picture house for four decades. The 1984 rescue was ingenious: developers built an office tower and hotel around and above the theatre without touching it, financing its transfer to the Symphony, with Helen Copley's 2-million-dollar gift naming the restored hall. The 2021-24 renovation was a to-the-bones reinvention: HGA, acoustician Paul Scarbrough of Akustiks and theatre planners Schuler Shook rebuilt the stage, raked the floor, added a choral terrace, moved the building's systems out of the basement and cut capacity from 2,248 to about 1,831 seats - deliberately smaller, so that every seat hears and sees better. The original Robert Morton pipe organ remains embedded in the chamber. The name honours Joan and Irwin Jacobs, the Qualcomm co-founder and his wife whose philanthropy has underwritten San Diego's cultural infrastructure for decades - and whose support, along with the bayside Rady Shell's success, emboldened the Symphony to rebuild rather than patch. Practical notes: the hall anchors Seventh and B downtown, a short walk from the Gaslamp Quarter with garages surrounding; beyond the Symphony's season under music director Rafael Payare, the room hosts comedy, films with live orchestra, and touring artists trading arena scale for acoustic quality.