White Oak Music Hall brings multi-stage music experience to Houston

Architectural rendering of the White Oak Music Hall, a five-acre, large-scale live music complex just north of Houston’s downtown at 2915 N. Main and North Street. The new venue will feature three stages. There will be a two indoor stages (one smaller, one larger) and one located outdoors which will have capacity for up to 3,000 people to rock and or roll under the stars. The smaller room can accommodate up to 400 people, while the larger room is expect to be able to hold up to 1,400. less Architectural rendering of the White Oak Music Hall, a five-acre, large-scale live music complex just north of Houston’s downtown at 2915 N. Main and North Street. The new venue will feature three stages. ... more Photo: SCHAUM|SHIEH ARCHITECTS Photo: SCHAUM|SHIEH ARCHITECTS Image 1 of / 21 Caption Close White Oak Music Hall brings multi-stage music experience to Houston 1 / 21 Back to Gallery

Pegstar Concerts head Jagi Katial is a busy man. The concert promoter is in the thick of final preparations for the seventh edition of Free Press Summer Festival, the two-day music festival in June that the concert promotions group has put on at Eleanor Tinsley Park since 2009.

He’s also overseeing the construction of a five-acre, large-scale live music complex just north of Houston’s downtown at 2915 N. Main and North Street.

Dubbed White Oak Music Hall, the new venue will feature three stages. There will be two indoor stages (one smaller, one larger) and one located outdoors which will have capacity for up to 3,000 people to rock and or roll under the stars.

The smaller room can accommodate up to 400 people, while the larger room is expected to be able to hold up to 1,400.

White Oak Music Hall wants to be the place where Houstonians make musical memories that last a lifetime.

“I'd love someone like Aretha Franklin to play here the opening month. I want to create a place where memories are made,” Katial says, looking out over the acreage from the top of The Tower, a six-story tower on the west end of the property.

Katial doesn't expect the cost of an average concert ticket or a drink to change, even given the new digs. There will still be free shows like Pegstar has always thrown too.

Local acts will continue to play a large role at the new venue, just as they did at Fitzgerald's.

Johnny So, Katial’s business partner at Fitzgerald's and the managing partner at the new site, is helping iron out the details for the complex while Katial and Pegstar lock in on the Summer Fest, which kicks off in just weeks.

According to So, the germ of the idea for the venue goes back nearly a decade.

"The first time Jagi and I discussed opening a venue was seven years ago over dinner at Rudyard's, and for that conversation to have grown into the White Oak Music Hall is a reflection of Houstonians' generous support of live music,” So says.

Musical memory strikes a chord with So as well.

“We want to build on that by making the White Oak Music Hall not just another place to see shows, but a live music institution for the city of Houston, complete with its own unique identity and fair share of 'rock-n'-roll' idiosyncrasies,” So adds.

Katial hopes for the first show at White Oak Music Hall to happen sometime in February 2016, barring any extreme weather issues.

RELATED: FPSF organizers to open new three-stage venue

Last August Pegstar announced that it had secured land just north of downtown Houston to build a large music venue complex.

In the past few weeks ground has been broken on the large property, a sprawling area just north of Little White Oak Bayou with a stellar, selfie-ready view of downtown Houston to the south.

Katial says engineers have said that flooding should not be an issue. It would take monumental flooding the likes that Houston saw during Tropical Storm Allison to effect the complex.

Being located just a few blocks from Metro’s North rail line could make it easier for concert-goers to commute to the venue, which was a concern for Katial.

There will be parking on site, plus existing street parking, but the Pegstar people would like to emphasize things like the existing MetroRail stop and ride-sharing services like Uber for music fans.

Pegstar has leased the Fitzgerald’s venue off White Oak Boulevard from Sara Fitzgerald, who has owned it since 1977. Katial says that they plan to be out of the venue by the first of September when his lease is officially up. Pegstar has leased it from her since September 2010, when they remodeled the venue and began booking live music and comedy on the two stages, downstairs and upstairs, most nights of the week.

Pegstar will have a whole slew of shows scheduled after that at venues all around Houston.

Katial says that Pegstar was in talks to purchase the venue from Fitzgerald at one point but the two parties could not come to an agreement for one reason or another.

The revitalization of the building has been a boon for development on White Oak, which now has a number of bars and restaurants that are full almost every night.

RELATED: Near Northside neighborhood braces for change

There are high hopes held by people who live in the Near Northside neighborhood where White Oak Music Hall will one day stand that the venue will do wonders for their neighborhood, which has been largely untouched by recent development in Houston’s booming real estate scene.

Fitzgerald’s was the impetus for the new developments on White Oak, so it is not a stretch to say that could happen north of downtown.

Of course some people in the neighborhood aren’t so thrilled about the development, citing concerns about traffic and the parking situation, which are valid.

For nine years Beth Lousteau and her family have lived just four blocks away from where White Oak Music Hall is coming up. She can see some of the upside of the development, but she’s worried about the extra traffic in the area trapping nearby residents in their own neighborhood when it’s the night of a big show like Pegstar is promising.

“This project is not universally welcomed by the neighboring community. We are talking about 4,400 people simultaneously visiting this venue,” she said Thursday. “How are all those people going to get in and out? All without even as much as the addition of a stop light?”

As for outdoor shows, Katial hopes to do at least 30 shows a year. He’s not worried about Houston’s sometime-scorching weather, as most of those shows on what is dubbed White Oak Lawn would be nighttime affairs.

"I'm not that afraid of the heat, I mean we put on a two-day festival every June in Houston, you know?" Katial says.

White Oak partner Will Garwood is ready for Houston to get back into the great outdoors and see live music, no matter the weather.

“I love outdoor concerts because while your ears are engaged, the rest of your senses are given the time and peace to take in the environment in a way we don’t often do in everyday life,” Garwood says. “I think Houstonians have been long overdue for an outdoor music venue capable of creating those transcendent moments.”

Katial wants to bring bands that don't come to Houston, actually to Houston for a change. He's helped build followings for national bands in Houston that can now command a large venue in the Bayou City when they begin to book a U.S. tour.

A typical twentysomething music fan in Houston with money to spend might very well go to an EDM show on a Friday night and a country festival the next afternoon. Houston's music personality is varied in 2015. Sampling different musical flavors is now the norm. The outdoor venue, for one, could help broaden Pegstar’s horizons in terms of genres it typically books.

He would like to have musical acts booked on one of the three stages every night of the week eventually.

The bar complex, located just under The Tower, will be open seven days a week.

"It will be open as its own stand-alone place where you can come watch a game, see a movie on movie night," Katial says. He doesn't rule out acoustic shows or DJ sets, done sparingly. He wants to foster a neighborhood bar atmosphere. Expect an open air bar, not unlike the ones that West Alabama Ice House and D&T Drive Inn, which are big weekend hits with Houstonians.

The Tower is poised to be the landmark for the White Oak complex. The six-story tower used to have a swinging bachelor pad apartment up top with a sprawling, picturesque view of the Downtown Houston skyline.

Katial wants to open it up for promotional parties, meet and greets, and other artist events. It could also just be opened for the general public before or after shows to get a cocktail.

It offers a 360-degree view of the area and it also makes great spot to watch I-45 traffic while you sip a drink and wait for a show to start.

Katial spent the last July 4th holiday watching fireworks from the top of the tower.

There are also plans for a coffee shop/record store nearby, as well.

Partner Troy Schaum with the architecture firm Schaum/Shieh is proud of the work that they have done for Pegstar. With offices in Houston and New York City, Schaum’s firm has worked on recording studios in Brooklyn, event spaces for the Music School at Rice University, and with several public arts organizations.

This was first time, though, he says that they’ve worked on something so significant on a civic scale.

“The team from the beginning comprised a diverse group of local voices that wanted to make a music experience that would transcend the single building and really make a new kind of public amenity for Houston,” says Schaum. “Along the way we looked into different types of spaces from history for both for their musical and civic impact.”

It was finding the essence of what made all those places work that was the challenge in creating White Oak Music Hall.

“Mostly in those examples the architecture gets out of the way and lets the artists interact with an audience in an immediate and intimate way,” Schaum says. “Jagi knows how to put on show and we wanted to give him the best possible place to make that happen.”

The biggest challenge Schaum says, was building a venue that felt as connected to Houston as the people behind it.

“We wanted to make something that felt both like a completely new music experience and also immediately would feel embedded in our sense of Houston,” he says.

This is easily the biggest thing that Pegstar has done, besides that annual music festival in Eleanor Tinsley Park that draws tens of thousands of people.

For Katial, this new venue is another milestone in the catalog of work that Pegstar has done for many years in town since Katial began booking club shows in Houston in November 2001, the first at Numbers in Montrose. The name Pegstar was a nod to one of his pet cats. His first show was a fundraiser for the Red Cross in the wake of 9/11, and he got bit by the booking bug as a music fan and the rest is history.

Is Katial nervous?

"I'm a little nervous, but I'm also excited and I am confident in the Houston music community that it’s in a place where I have no doubt that they will support this," Katial says.