ST. LOUIS — The Hawthorn, a new, multi-use event space in Downtown West, opened Thursday night.
“St. Louis has a lot of great venues, and it has some really nice event spaces,” Josh Billue, owner of Marathon Live, a Nashville, Tennessee-based venue management company, said. “We kind of straddle the line between both. So ideally, we don’t take anything away from the market. We just want more shows and more events, and we thought we could provide that with this facility.”
The space, at 2231 Washington Ave., is set to provide St. Louisans with a variety of entertainment options in its first month of operations – from concerts to fashion shows to a hip-hop Karaoke event. The space is also available to be rented for private events ranging from weddings, corporate events and holiday parties.
“The number of events and concerts, and the percentage of what we’re doing more of, really just depends on what the market dictates,” Jeremy Hicks, Marathon Live’s communication director, said.
Marathon Live was founded in 2011 and operates four venues, with The Hawthorn being its fifth. Its other venues are in Nashville, Tennessee; Kansas City; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Little Rock, Arkansas. A sixth venue is coming to Jacksonville, Florida, according to the company’s website.
The Downtown West was sold in January 2019 to Abbott Properties, a Kansas City-based property management company that paid $1.6 million, records show. The building was constructed in the 1950s and, throughout its history, has served as a car dealership, auto garage, storage facility and staging room for movie sets.
Read the full story on the St. Louis Business Journal website.
