The Ponte Vedra Concert Hall in Florida will reopen after a 15-month renovation that saw the venue receive a new second-floor balcony and expanded seating and performance areas, along with new best-in-class audio and lighting systems. Multiple Grammy Award-winning bluegrass artist Dan Tyminski will open the venue Friday (Aug. 1) and set the stage for a new season of live performances.
Led by Gabriel Pellicer, CEO/president of SJC Cultural Events, which also manages the famed St. Augustine Amphitheater, Ponte Vedra’s reopening traces back to February 2011 when St. John’s County acquired the former church as part of a land deal. Over the years, artists including Art Garfunkel, Ziggy Marley and Ani DiFranco have played the venue.
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The facility “was showing a lot of success for cultural impact and the greater good of our community,” over the past decade, Pellicer says. “St John’s County has a lot of people that love live music and we took this old church and built it into a venue that people came to truly love. Now, after 12 years of pilot testing and making a serious long term investment, we’re eager to unveil the next phase of this true passion project.”
Designed by the architecture and interior design firm Fisher Koppenhafer, the expanded Ponte Vedra Concert Hall includes a new second-floor wrap-around balcony and an outdoor terrace. Overall capacity will expand 25% — up from about 900 to roughly 1,100 attendees — as part of the renovation, which also includes modernized restrooms, a multi-use room for special events and meetings and expanded backstage offerings for artists.
Ponte Vedra is also getting a serious sound upgrade with the installation of a L’Acoustics L2D 50K watt audio system, providing the venue with a best-in-class large-format sound system customized for a compact performance space.
The total cost of renovation is $12.9 million, with much of it spearheaded by the non-profit Friends of the Ponte Vedra Concert Hall, which was instrumental in launching the “Elevate” campaign, the driving force behind expanding the venue with the addition of a second-floor balcony. In June 2022, the St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners awarded $5.4 million in funding for the renovation project.
“It’s exciting because it cements our reputation as a world class music and arts presenter in the state of Florida,” says Pellicer. “We want managers and agents to know about Ponte Vedra whenever they need a date in Florida and they are looking for a place they could trust to treat the artist the right way.”
The venue now has four guest dressing rooms for traveling shows, three showers and two laundry facilities — rare amenities for a venue its size, said Pellicer.
“To be in a room for 12 years and to read every single Google review and acknowledge every single thing you want to do better and finally get the handcuffs pulled off of you and be able to sit down and design it the way you wanted it is a special experience,” Pellicer says. “We’re going to absolutely crush it once we open.”
