On its face, booking a 1,000-cap room in San Antonio through a talent buying team based in New York City is a bit unorthodox, but promoter Peter Shapiro said he spotted three opportunities at Stable Hall, deep in the heart of Texas, that intrigued him as a promoter.

The first was the building itself – opened after an $11 million renovation in 2023 converting a 131-year draft horse stable into a two-story live music room decked out with handcrafted finishes and hundreds of thousands of dollars in folk art and original pieces including chandeliers from the site’s original Pearl brewery. In accepting the deal, Shapiro would be charged with helping to book and manage the ultramodern music club replete with reclaimed wood floors, limestone tiling, two large artist green rooms, six full bars and an ornate proscenium-style stage.

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Second, Shapiro said, was the team he would deploy to help with Stable Hall including DayGlo’s head of Production and Media Jesse Lautner and Dayglo and Newport Folk, Newport Jazz, and New York’s Hudson Clearwater Festival talent buyer Hannah Gold, as well as the venue’s new GM Garrett Zimmerman and his local talent buyer Noah Slavin.

Third was Stable Hall’s setting inside the Pearl, a sprawling riverfront entertainment and tourism district built on the campus of a former brewery that is home to a number of Michelin-starred restaurants and the spectacular Hotel Emma, a 148-room bespoke riverfront property selected as Texas’ best hotel in 2025 by U.S. News.

“This is a unique experience to provide artists with these kinds of amenities,” Zimmerman said. “They don’t have to get an Uber to go somewhere. Everything’s within a couple of minutes’ walk.”

That ecosystem is part of what convinced Shapiro to take the project. “When a venue is part of a bigger thing, like Pearl, it takes some of the pressure off. The ownership is aligned,” he told Billboard.

“I don’t typically take on these kind of projects for other venues but there was something special about this place,” said Shapiro as he walked the property during a recent November Shakey Graves show. Shapiro’s never shy about making suggestions — counseling Zimmerman to lower the house lights for the mezzanine’s intermission or programming the gobos on the curtain to slowly move around like bubbles in water.

“Sure this is a little different than what I normally do, but I saw something really special in this place” said Shapiro, founder of the Brooklyn Bowl brand (with four venues total in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Nashville and Las Vegas), and operator of New York’s Capitol Theater, Bearsville Theater near Woodstock, Garcia’s in Chicago. Shapiro also runs longtime jam band magazine and brand Relix out of his Manhattan office.

Alejandro Escovedo performs at Stable Hall, June 8 Oscar Moreno

Shapiro’s involvement with Stable Hall begins in part thanks to a disagreement between the original partners. After a two-year renovation, Stable Hall opened in January 2024 with high expectations, but the relationship between the property managers who operated the venue as Potluck Hospitality and the Austin, Texas management and promotion company they put together called Wood Hall LLC did not perform as hoped.

Court filings alleged that Stable Hall had lost more than $2.5 million in its first 10 months, with Pot Luck blaming Wood Hall for “sheer incompetence,” insufficient bookings and events, and failure to obtain essential licenses. Potluck fired Wood Hall in late October 2024, prompting a legal battle that continues to work its way through the courts.

Many observers wondered whether Stable Hall would find its footing.

The turnaround began when Potluck hired Zimmerman, a 15-year venue operator known for his work on distressed properties like TempleLive in Cleveland. Then came the call that would alter the venue’s trajectory: Stable Hall would partner with Shapiro’s Dayglo Presents.

Shapiro normally only works with rooms he builds or renovates himself, but after visiting Pearl, he saw something rare. “It’s pretty unbelievable… unlike anything you walked around,” he told Billboard. “We’re not going to run it. We’re going to help them run it better… across marketing, booking, operations, production, accounting. We just want to bring what we’ve learned from doing this every day for 30 years.”

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With Dayglo’s arrival came top-tier programming leadership — notably Gold, who said she immediately saw Stable Hall’s potential as a flexible, artist-friendly room with multiple configurations (350 to 970 capacity) and high-quality production.

“It’s a really beautiful room and you can configure it several different ways,” Gold explains. “There isn’t a room like that in San Antonio. The hope is artists come through once, love it, and keep coming back.”

To improve local bookings, Zimmerman hired Slavin as the venues local talent buyer, securing a young music veteran of San Antonio’s independent scene with experience booking multi-stage festivals and more than 100 local acts annually.

“You can support your local music scene in a big way at 1,000 cap,” Zimmerman says. “Noah’s deeply plugged into the community… someone who can make sure we’re contributing to that ecosystem.”
Meanwhile, Gold — with her Texas roots from 11 years booking Luck Reunion at Willie Nelson’s ranch — is shaping a balanced, genre-diverse national calendar.

Early pillars include Texas alt-country genres like Red Dirt country and Americana, as well as Latin music like the Tex Mex fusing Tejano sound made famous by Texas legend Selena Quintanilla who grew up two hours south of San Antonio in Corpus Christi. Zimmerman said Texas also historically has supported metal, punk and hard rock genres and said the building is interested in exploring growth areas, like comedy and even live podcasts.

Stable Hall in San Antonio, Texas. Oscar Moreno

Gold says she expects the flexibility of the room — from intimate seated sets to standing-room blowouts — to attract underplays and multi-night residencies

“Given the area, the hotel, the restaurants, maybe we get some underplays in the room. That’s a special experience for fans,” she told Billboard.

Shapiro says Stable Hall will work “if we can create the culture to succeed. It only works if you can try stuff — and sometimes fail.”

Zimmerman said so far, the collaboration seems to be working and describes the new collective as “extremely human, extremely humble,” with “big personalities but not big egos.”