Concert hall with room for 3,300 proposed for downtown Portland
Rendering / Courtesy of Leonardo Ruben Merlos
A new 3,300-capacity music venue is envisioned for 244 Cumberland Ave. in Portland.
Two years after the MGM Music Hall at Fenway opened in Boston, a slightly smaller, modern venue is envisioned for Portland to draw more big-name artists to Maine’s biggest city.
Mile Marker Investments, a Scarborough-based developer whose commercial portfolio includes the Longfellow Hotel that opened earlier this year on Portland's West End, is teaming up on the Portland music hall project with Live Nation Entertainment Inc. (NYSE: LYV). Live Nation also operates the MGM concert hall in Boston.
The proposed 66,000-square-foot Portland venue, which requires approval by Portland's Planning Board, would be located at 224 Cumberland Ave., steps from the Merrill Auditorium that's attached to City Hall.
With room for 3,300 concertgoers, the new facility would fill a niche that falls between the 1,900-capacity Merrill Auditorium and the 6,200-capacity Cross Insurance Arena, according to the developers.
“This is a size venue that doesn’t exist in the city,” Todd Goldenfarb of Mile Marker Investments told Mainebiz in a phone interview over the weekend.
"We'd like together some of the tours that are going to MGM but haven't had the place to play in Portland," added Goldenfarb, who has gone to concerts by Guster, Bruno Mars and James Taylor at the Boston venue. “I think it’s going to grow the pool of talent that comes here."
The Portland venue would be staffed by more than 250 part- and full-time employees with base pay starting at $20 per hour, he said.
Construction timeline
While Goldenfarb declined to disclose the estimated project cost, he said it will be self-financed by Mile Marker Investments and Live Nation, a multinational entertainment company formed from the 2010 merger with Ticketmaster.
Once the project gets the green light from the city, the plan is to start construction in 2025 and open by late 2027.
Planned features include a classic marquee, large glass doors that open to a retro-inspired lobby with an operable partition that connects to the music hall and exposed brick manufactured in Maine.
Although the facility would not have parking of its own, Goldenfarb said that shouldn't be an issue given its proximity to the Top of the Old Port garage as well as several other downtown garages.
With the majority of shows at off-peak hours, he said, 'that opens up some spaces in those garages that during the day are full of people" who work in town. Inside the concert hall itself, four bays for tour buses to drop off passengers would be a "great feature," he noted.
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