Martin Luther King Jr. spoke from the same stage where Madonna and Bob Marley later performed. The Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, was built by the Works Progress Administration for about 200,000 Depression dollars and dedicated on 3 May 1941 as the Greek Bowl - a classic fan-shaped Greek amphitheatre carved into the campus, its steep tiers engineered with the pin-drop acoustics of the ancient originals. The history stacked into the 4,600-seat bowl is genuinely singular. On 29 May 1964, Dr. King addressed a near-capacity audience there, calling for passage of the Civil Rights Act then being debated in the Senate - one of the venue's proudest chapters. The concert ledger spans generations: Benny Goodman with the San Diego Symphony, Joan Baez, Frank Zappa, Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett and Bill Cosby in the earlier eras; Madonna, Adele, The Offspring, Franz Ferdinand and The Fray among the moderns, with the venue long serving as San Diego's premier mid-size outdoor stage. Operated by the Associated Students of SDSU with Live Nation as concert promoter, the amphitheatre runs a dense summer season of rock, pop, hip-hop, Latin and comedy tours, its scale hitting the sweet spot between club and arena: every seat outdoors, every seat close, with state-of-the-art staging and sound retrofitted into the 1941 bones. The naming-rights agreement with California Coast Credit Union - the venue's first - took effect in January 2014, renaming what had long been called simply the Open Air Theatre. The campus setting seals the experience: the trolley's SDSU station a short walk away, Mission Valley below, and warm San Diego evenings that make an open-air venue viable most of the year - an eighty-year-old WPA project still doing exactly what it was built to do, under the same stars.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA, United States, 92182

Website: https://www.sdsuamphitheater.com

Capacity: 4600

Opening Date: 03/05/1941

Outdoor Area

Accessible