Two New Venues For Frankfurt

While Jahrhunderthalle Frankfurt in Germany opened a 600-capacity club on its ground floor, a new 13,000-cap arena received the go-ahead from the city.

– Jahrhunderthalle Frankfurt Club

The club at Jahrhunderthalle can be reconfigured to hold 400 people seated. The club adds a small capacity venue to Frankfurt’s venue scene. Promoters had been forced to look in the surrounding cities for adequate space.

So-called Music Sneak nights are part of the club’s program. As with sneak previews in cinemas, visitors won’t have a clue which band will be on stage on such nights. The 13,000-capacity arena has been a topic of discussion since 2012. Negotiations were dragged out by politics, as the arena would also occupy land of Frankfurt’s neighboring city Offenbach. Now the project has received the green light.

Bidding in the tender process are AEG, whose German operations also include the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin and the Barclaycard Arena in Hamburg, as well as Lagardère Sports, which owns half of Frankfurt’s Commerzbank-Arena.

When Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung spoke to a couple of promoters about the planned arena in summer 2016, opinions differed.

Ralf Scheffler, who runs the 1,500-capacity Batschkapp in Frankfurt, thought a new arena was unnecessary. The paper also quoted promoter Ossy Hoppe saying it would have made more sense to upgrade the existing Festhalle Frankfurt.

The project is estimated to cost between euro 100 million and 150 million. There won’t be any grants by the city, which will make the 20,000-square-meter property available at market value, fnp.de reports.