Take a walk in downtown Sioux Falls on any given weekend and you’ll find plenty to do from the Sculpture Walk to fine dining and retail shopping. Now there’s an effort by a national foundation to bring outdoor concerts to downtown through a project called Levitt at the Falls.

Outdoor concerts could soon be a part of the downtown landscape.

Through a public-private partnership, the Levitt Foundation wants to build a state of the art, light and sound stage at 5th Street and Phillips Avenue.

Sharon Yazowski, executive director for the Levitt Foundation, says the Levitt at the Falls will host top talent music artists from across the country.

“This year of the 2016 Grammy nominations, 21 nominees have appeared on Levitt stages in recent years,” Yazowski said.

Currently, there are eight Levitt music venues in the U.S. mostly in larger cities, but Yazowski says Sioux Falls stood out as a smaller city that could support these types of concerts.

“Typically we select cities that are 400,000 to 500,000 or above in population, but when we learned of Sioux Falls and its growth and its committed leadership to creating programming that will bring the community together, it was a clear match for the Levitt program,” Yazowski said.

If the outdoor concert stage gets built, it’s going to host several concerts, not just one or two, but 50 and they’re all free.

The idea is to have top talent playing on stage every Thursday, Friday and Saturday throughout the summer months, but the benefits go beyond live music.

“In addition to the 50 free concerts, there will be this wonderful venue that community groups can use for other events; festivals, performances and schools can use for graduation and their events as well,” Yazowski said.

The total cost of the project is $4.5 million. The city would have to commit $2.5 million of that. The rest would be paid through fundraising by the Friends of Levitt.

They hope to break ground in 2018 with the first concerts to hit the stage in the summer of 2019.

Below is a long list of performers who have performed on Levitt stages.

Marcia Ball

GRAMMY Award winner, Brave Combo

GRAMMY Award winner, Mike Farris

GRAMMY Award winner, Jose Feliciano

GRAMMY Award winner, Booker T. Jones

GRAMMY Award winner, Mariachi Divas

Lisa Marie Presley

GRAMMY Award winner, Quetzal

Ray Wylie Hubbard

St. Paul and the Broken Bones

This year we were thrilled to learn that the following 21 artists—who’ve performed on Levitt stages across the country — have received nominations for the 58th Annual GRAMMY Awards:



Dale Ann Bradley

Brothers Osborne

Bomba Estereo

Cedric Burnside Project

Hayes Carll

Cory Chisel

Jon Cleary

Alex Cuba

Rocky Dawuni

Gustafer Yellowgold

Trey Hensley

Bettye LaVette

Bob Mintzer

Monsieur Periné

José-Luis Orozco

Pentatonix

Keali’i Reichel

The Revelers

Snarky Puppy

Abigail Washburn

Kirk Whalum