City Auditorium

Known around town simply as The Aud, this limestone landmark has anchored downtown Eureka Springs since 1929.

In 1928, Mayor Claude A. Fuller commissioned it as the city looked to reinvent itself for a new era, hiring architect Albert O. Clarke to design a civic hall worthy of the ambition. The finished building, laid up in rough-cut local limestone at a cost of ninety thousand dollars, opened that September, a few weeks before the stock market crash. The first act to take the stage was John Philip Sousa and his sixty-seven-piece band, playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for a mountain town of a few thousand people.

What followed was nearly a century of everything. School basketball in the basement gym until the 1960s, Saturday night dances, operas, plays, and a run of touring artists that reads like a survey of American music: Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor, Merle Haggard, Levon Helm, John Mayall, John Hammond, Jefferson Starship, Dwight Yoakam, Arlo Guthrie, and Ani DiFranco, among many others. A 2005 restoration, backed in part by a federal Save America’s Treasures grant, brought the room back without sanding off its character.

Today The Aud seats roughly a thousand under those same walls, with sightlines and acoustics that make a small hall feel like a secret. It still books local, national, and international talent across nearly every genre, which means the next name on that list is probably playing this season.