A Killer of a Grand Opening SteelhOuSe OmAhA IS A teStAment tO the CIty’S ReSOlve

Although still fresh in most of our memories, we have to acknowledge what we were about to face in November 2019 when Omaha Performing Arts (O-pa) announced the yet-to-benamed, $109 million project that would become Steelhouse Omaha.

The idea of a world-crippling pandemic was the last thing on anyone’s mind at the time. That would come a few months later, in March 2020, when COVID-19 became the center of everything, shutting down our world and the music industry with it.

O-pa’s plan suddenly seemed like a fool’s dream — no one knew what was going to happen with the pandemic. At the same time, the project was a beacon of hope, assurance that somehow we’d get through all the sickness and death, that O-pa and its patrons must know something or they wouldn’t hold onto a commitment to build a facility designed to host a crowd of 3,000 like a herd of cattle, standing shoulder to shoulder in a windowless, confined hall – the absolute last place anyone would want to be in the middle of an airborne-spread health crisis.

And yet, here I was, three-and-a-half years later, COVID-19 much less threatening, standing in a security line next to a bank of search lights on the night of Steelhouse

Omaha’s grand opening, waiting to dive head-first into a maskless crowd. Ain’t humanity amazing?

Located at 11th and Dodge, only a stone’s throw from the Holland Performing Arts Center, Steelhouse is destined to become a landmark for live music. From the ground up, it is an ultra-modern concert hall that appears to have erupted right out of the concrete in downtown Omaha.