Sacramento Railyards development plans 5,000-seat event venue in central plaza
Sacramento’s downtown railyard development recently filed plans to convert a historic paint shop into a 5,000-seat event venue, part of a central plaza within the city’s biggest active building project.
Downtown Railyard Venture LLC in late December filed planning documents to convert some of the long-vacant warehouse buildings just north of the Amtrak station into a 5-acre plaza called “Central Shops at the Railyards.”
Anchoring the plaza would be the transformation of a registered historic building formerly used as a paint shop facility into a “mixed-use public entertainment venue for 3,500 – 5,000 people,” according to planning documents filed shortly before Christmas to the Sacramento city manager’s office.
Plans for the venue, including architectural renderings that show it named simply “the Paintshop,” were first reported Wednesday morning by the Sacramento Business Journal.
The project’s architect of record is Adam Lovern of Sacramento-based RMW Architecture & Interiors, a firm with a local portfolio including the Ice Blocks on R Street and the Kings’ corporate office inside the Kimpton Sawyer Hotel, according to RMW’s website. At least three other firms are involved, including SWA Group, which provided some rendering images.
The coronavirus pandemic kept large entertainment events out of sight and out of mind for most of 2020.
But it hasn’t halted the building boom in California’s capital city, driven by major housing demand and other developments to transform blighted or vacant portions of the city’s downtown area.
No other development in the works is as vast or ambitious as the Railyards, set to be buoyed by a Major League Soccer stadium, a Kaiser Permanente medical center and a new 17-story Sacramento County courthouse, with construction recently having started on the latter.
