Crowd members at the Regency Ballroom used to faint. Not from awe, but from the heat.
Constructed in 1909 by the Scottish Rite Freemasons, the 115-year-old Fillmore building’s ventilation system had grown dysfunctional over time. “It can be 50 degrees and foggy outside,” said Patrick Maloney, the ballroom’s general manager. “Then the headliner goes on, and it’s 88 and steamy in here.”
The sound system had aged, too. In the past decade, the Regency — capacity 1,343, a bit bigger than the Fillmore — had become a challenging location for finicky audiophiles, who left scathing assessments on reviews sites like Yelp and Google. Now, the glamorous ballroom, ringed by elaborate scrollwork and gold leaf-covered lion’s heads, has been renovated and brought up to a modern, climate-controlled splendor.
Goldenvoice, the local affiliate of entertainment giant AEG, has operated the Regency since 2008, but it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that Maloney and his team were able to tackle the much-needed upgrades. “I went back and read every one- and two-star Yelp review for the last 10 years, and the same things kept coming up,” Maloney said — namely, HVAC and sound issues.
Apart from a fresh coat of salamander-green paint, the main room’s interior was left largely untouched. But it did get a new video wall, expanded lighting rigs, new ventilation, and a state-of-the-art sound system.
“The speakers that we have now fit the room a lot better,” Maloney said. “Before, it was just, like, a classic rock ’n’ roll system — just hit ’em hard, and you get what you get. This one is more high-tech.”
There are all-new greenrooms, with full-size couches and vanity mirrors. And there are new restrooms — lots of them.
“We had 10 toilets for 1,300 people,” Maloney said, noting that long lines kill an evening’s fun like almost nothing else. So they gutted and redid all the restrooms on the main level and added two more deluxe loos downstairs, doubling the total number of toilets to 20. “This is the thing I’m most proud of,” Maloney says with a laugh.
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Of course, you don’t go to a show for the bathrooms. But you might be curious to see the hand-operated birdcage elevator, which whisks visitors to the third floor to see a church-slash-performance-space the Masons built, with stained-glass windows, a recently tuned organ, and a vibe that might best be described as “consecrated.”
With a capacity of 300, this upstairs room is used mostly for weddings and corporate events, and sometimes casual after-parties for acts who’ve played downstairs, as when singer-songwriter Weyes Blood sold out two nights. Her tour didn’t have a stop the next day, so the staff brought in cake and booze and let the group hang out.
“It ended with their keyboard player playing the organ until 2:30 in the morning, with the whole band and crew and their friends just lying on the floor,” Maloney said.
Although Maloney and the team found the building’s original blueprints, the multimillion-dollar restoration took several years longer than expected. The venue was reopened in time for September’s Portola Festival, the two-day rave at Pier 80 that Goldenvoice also produces.
In its newly updated form, the Regency is booking exciting acts like Australian psych-rock band Pond, electronic duo Flight Facilities, and R&B songstress Victoria Monét. Swedish producer DJ Seinfeld will play Friday, and given that Goldenvoice produces Coachella, at least a few of the acts playing that festival’s back-to-back weekends in April are likely to swing through town.
