Merriweather Post Pavilion
Jim James performing at the Merriweather Post Pavilion on August 12, 2011
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| Address | 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway |
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| Location | Columbia, Howard County, Maryland |
| Coordinates | 39°12′33.29″N 76°51′45.61″W / 39.2092472°N 76.8626694°WCoordinates: 39°12′33.29″N 76°51′45.61″W / 39.2092472°N 76.8626694°W |
| Public transit |
RTA 406 (Central Library stop) RTA 501 , RTA 503, MTA 315 (Broken Land/Hickory Ridge) |
| Owner | The Howard Hughes Corporation |
| Operator | I.M.P. Inc. |
| Type | amphitheater |
| Genre(s) | music |
| Seating type | lawn, stadium |
| Capacity | 19,319 |
| Construction | |
| Opened | 1967 |
| Renovated | 2015-2016 |
| Architect | Gehry, Walsh, & O'Malley |
| Website | |
| merriweathermusic |
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Merriweather Post Pavilion is an outdoor concert venue located within Symphony Woods, a 40-acre (162,000-m²) lot of preserved land in the heart of the planned community of Columbia, Maryland. In 2010, Merriweather was named the second best amphitheater in the United States by Billboard magazine. The venue was also ranked as the fourth best amphitheater in the United States by Rolling Stone in 2013. It was again ranked by Consequence of Sound at number 29 of all music venues in the nation out of 100 in 2016.
Merriweather Post Pavilion was commissioned by the Rouse Company for its Howard County development project Columbia. The first design was rejected and the theatre was redesigned by award-winning architect Frank Gehry and N. David O'Malley with the firm of Gehry, Walsh and O'Malley. It opened in 1967 on the former grounds of the Oakland Manor slave plantation. It is named for the American Post Foods heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post who promised and withdrew donations to Rouse for the facility. The theatre was originally intended to be a summer home for the National Symphony Orchestra. It later became a venue for popular music concerts, including performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, The Grateful Dead, and The Who.
A grand opening gala was held on July 14, 1967, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended a presentation of "Columbia: Broadsides for Orchestra" in a driving rainstorm that flooded the orchestra to its knees. The Orchestra went bankrupt the next year. In the 1968 season, controversial presidential candidate George Wallace held a 7500-person rally on June 27, 1968, followed shortly after by candidate Eugene McCarthy. In 1970, Columbia's manager Richard Anderson dropped bookings of rock venues after gate crashing and disturbances at a Steppenwolf concert. The Nederlander Organization began managing the venue in 1971. By 1972, the music shifted from Rouse & Merriweather's vision of symphonies to rock venues, and Charles E. Miller proposed bills that would disallow performances of entertainers with a history of violence in venues with a capacity of 3,000 or more. In the summer of 1974, Howard Research and Development manager Micheal Spear banned rock music after incidents, listing Alice Cooper, Grateful Dead, and Edgar Winter as artists that were unacceptable.
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