The Grand Center home of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will reopen in September 2025 with a new name, following a $140 million renovation and expansion.
The Jack C. Taylor Music Center will encompass Powell Hall, the performance venue built in 1925 that’s been home to St. Louis Symphony since 1968, plus a 64,000-square-foot expansion including an entrance lobby, education center and backstage wing for performers.
SLSO leaders announced the Powell Hall expansion in 2022, as an approximately $100 million project planned for a reopening sometime in 2025. The renaming announcement on Wednesday includes the news that concerts will indeed resume at Powell Hall in September of next year.
The 2024-25 season will be the second and last to be staged at Stifel Theatre and other venues while construction of the Jack C. Taylor Music Center continues.
“No individual patron in the long history of the SLSO has had a greater impact on the success of the orchestra than Jack Taylor. It is fitting that our new Music Center will bear his name, a tribute to an extraordinary leader and friend,” said SLSO board Chair Steven L. Finerty in a statement.
Taylor, the late founder of Enterprise Rent-A-Car and a prolific donor to St. Louis arts organizations, made a $40 million contribution to help establish the orchestra’s endowment trust in 2000, a donation noted at the time as the largest ever given to an American orchestra. The gift saved the institution "from the brink of bankruptcy,” according to an SLSO statement. Taylor also founded the Crawford Taylor Foundation, which made a $30 million gift to support the Powell Hall renovation and expansion.
The SLSO estimates that Taylor gave more than $1 billion to St. Louis organizations before his death in 2016. The new visitor center opened by Missouri Botanical Garden in 2022 also bears his name.
The renovation and expansion includes new seats for the concert hall, which will see a reduction in capacity by about 500, though the new capacity of 2,150 will keep the venue in line with those of similarly sized orchestras in the U.S. A 3,400-square-foot extension on space previously occupied by a parking lot will include room for education programs and lectures, rehearsal space for the St. Louis Symphony Chorus and the St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON Chorus.
International architecture firm Snøhetta is leading the project.
Powell Hall, originally named the St. Louis Theatre, was initially home to vaudeville performances and film screenings. St. Louis Symphony Orchestra first played the hall in 1965 before permanently relocating there.
