A Chesterfield After Hours concert at River City Sportsplex. EventMakers, having ended its run in Chesterfield, is now planning to launch a new concert series in Innsbrook. (BizSense file)
The show is back on at an outdoor concert venue in Innsbrook that went dark several years ago.
Local promoter EventMakers-USA announced plans Wednesday to bring a new concert series to 4901 Lake Brook Drive, where it formerly held the long-running Innsbrook After Hours concert series.
The new series will be called Tribute Thursdays, run from June 5 to Sept. 25 and feature national tribute bands playing covers of popular musical groups. Tribute Thursdays will be the first run of shows under the venue’s new umbrella brand, After Hours Concerts at the Innsbrook Pavilion. The evening concerts are aimed at the area’s office workers and families.
Larry Creeger of EventMakers said he approached Highwoods Properties, the owner of the 4-acre Lake Brook site, with the idea of a new concert series once it became clear EventMakers wasn’t going to continue its Chesterfield After Hours series, where tribute bands proved popular.
“We did very well with (tribute acts) Rumours and Get the Led Out. People loved them,” Creeger said of the Chesterfield shows. “We said the best place for these kinds of groups is Innsbrook.”
Creeger said there are plans to add a food court, games for adults and children and a beer garden to the Innsbrook site, which has a capacity of 3,500 people.
Highwoods, a major Innsbrook landlord whose holdings also include the adjacent North Shore Commons office complex, was receptive to the idea as a means to use the dormant concert property ahead of plans to develop it as additional office space, said Jane DuFrane, the real estate firm’s Richmond market leader.
Highwoods still plans eventually to build a pair of 150,000-square-foot office buildings on the Lake Brook site, but the firm has put those plans on the back burner for the time being in response to industry trends.
“The office market is not ready for new construction, so we’re thinking about ways we can repurpose that land to make sure the Innsbrook community has another amenity,” DuFrane said.
The eventual office buildings are envisioned as part of a larger, 34-acre mixed-use development being planned by Highwoods and New England developer Northland. Highwoods would develop the offices and successfully rezoned the overall assemblage in 2021. Northland bought the bulk of the property slated for development from Highwoods for $23 million in 2022.
DuFrane said Highwoods hasn’t put on any formal programming at the site since EventMakers departed the property in 2020. Innsbrook After Hours briefly continued at a nearby shopping center after EventMakers’ departure but has since ended. The property also was eyed for a food truck park that never materialized.
DuFrane said the workplace disruptions seen during the pandemic years seem to have stabilized in Innsbrook and return-to-office trends prompted Highwood to revisit concerts in the office park.
“It was the right time,” DuFrane said. “I think that you’re seeing a resurgence.”
Highwoods is leasing the concert site to EventMakers for one year. The landlord isn’t going to get a cut of the ticket sales from the events, DuFrane said.
Once the Innsbrook series is launched, EventMakers will have two regular concert series, the other being the After Hours series held in Doswell. Eventmakers’ Chesterfield-based series ended last month.
Creeger said that EventMakers exited Chesterfield’s River City Sportsplex, where it had put on concerts for several years, to make way for the construction of new recreational amenities at the youth tournament venue. He said that county officials suggested the Chesterfield fairgrounds as a new location, but EventMakers passed because it deemed it too far from its audience base.
EventMakers didn’t share the names of bands expected to perform in the Tribute Thursdays series but said more details would be forthcoming.
Welcome back!
“Laissez les bons temps rouler”
hot Innsbrook nights