Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 19/06/2026 22:34:00

Built as a Salvation Army citadel in 1925, the brick building one block south of Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton has spent most of its life ringing with music rather than hymns. Designed by the prolific Edmonton architects Herbert Magoon and George Heath MacDonald, it served as a place of worship before becoming, by 1965, the first home of the Citadel Theatre company, which took its name from the building. After the theatre company moved to a purpose-built home on Churchill Square in 1978, the old citadel was converted into a concert hall and bar. It opened as The Bronx on the last night of 1989 and, through the 1990s and 2000s, ran under names including The Rev and Lush, hosting early shows by then-unknown American bands such as Nirvana and Green Day as it built a reputation as a key stop for rising acts. The Rev closed in 2003, and the venue reopened as The Starlite Room in 2004, the name it still carries. Over the years it expanded into multiple spaces: the main upstairs hall holds around 400, a back room called the Temple holds roughly half that, and a downstairs lounge, River City Revival House, which opened in 2018, holds about 120, allowing the venue to run shows at several scales. Across its incarnations the building has hosted thousands of performances spanning every genre, from Questlove, Run the Jewels and Feist to Mastodon, MGMT, Amon Amarth and Propagandhi, becoming an Edmonton mainstay woven into the memories of generations of local concertgoers. Its ability to scale from intimate club shows to larger gigs has been central to that longevity. Marking decades of activity, the Starlite Room has weathered shifting ownership, identities and even the changing economics of a live-music business less reliant on bar sales. As one of the city's enduring music venues, it continues to present a diverse calendar from a historic building that has been making noise for the better part of a century.