New 2,300-seat live music and event venue planned for midtown Sacramento

Sacramento has long been in search of another mid-sized concert venue that would draw acts not quite big enough to fill Golden 1 Center but popular enough to attract a couple thousand concertgoers.

There’s suddenly a lot of interest in building one.

SKK Developments, the firm behind several of the central city’s latest high-end apartment buildings, has proposed building a live music, comedy and event theater with a seating capacity of 2,300 in midtown Sacramento. The new theater would replace a vacant industrial building at the southwest corner of 24th and R streets.

The city has several vibrant music venues, including Ace of Spades a few blocks east on R Street and the newly-renovated SAFE Credit Union Performing Arts Center downtown. A 5,000-seat event venue is planned for the former paint shops of the downtown Railyards. And a live music venue has been proposed for Ramona Avenue, south of the California State University, Sacramento campus.

Architectural drawings for the new theater show it would attract acts such as Wilco (performing later this month at the Fillmore in San Francisco) and Sleater-Kinney. The new theater would cover just under 43,000 square feet, according to documents filed with the city of Sacramento. It “is intended to anchor the east end of the R Street Corridor and to serve as a catalyst for future mixed-use development,” a project narrative said.

A bonus for the theater’s location: a light rail station is directly in front of the building, “literally at the front door of the project,” the developers wrote.