Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

The 9:30 Club's owners spent everything they knew about concert rooms on one building, and opened it with the Foo Fighters. The Anthem at 901 Wharf Street SW opened on October 12, 2017, the anchor tenant of The Wharf, the $2 billion redevelopment of Washington's Southwest Waterfront along the Potomac. The $60 million, 57,000-square-foot hall was built by I.M.P. - Seth Hurwitz's independent promotion company that also runs the 9:30 Club, Lincoln Theatre and Merriweather Post Pavilion - to fill the gap between club and arena that had long routed mid-size tours around the capital. The room's signature is flexibility: a movable stage and backdrop scale capacity anywhere from 2,500 to 6,000, with fully seated configurations from 2,300 to 3,200, so a theatre show and a near-arena show can play the same address in the same week. The three-story hall wraps the floor in balcony boxes individually angled to face the stage, the first two rows of each designated as reserved Super Excellent Seats, and the acoustics were designed by WSDG with d&b Audiotechnik reinforcement for arena production in club intimacy. Since the Foo Fighters cut the ribbon, more than 800 artists across a thousand-plus events have played the room - rock, hip-hop, comedy, the National Symphony Orchestra, WWE tapings, even weddings and auto shows - making it the default big-room booking in the District. The setting does its share of the work: the venue opens onto the Wharf's mile of piers, promenades and restaurants, a short walk from the National Mall, with the Waterfront and L'Enfant Plaza Metro stops feeding the doors. Hurwitz's stated ambition at the opening - to make it the greatest concert venue in the world - set the tone for the operation: every lesson from four decades of the 9:30 Club applied at five times the scale, down to the sightline geometry of the balcony boxes and the club-style bar service on every level.