Fillmore Auditorium

Fillmore Auditorium is a 3,600-capacity Denver concert room housed in a building that began life as the Mammoth Roller Skating Rink in 1907. Its distinguishing feature is built into the structure: the original rink architecture still informs a broad, flexible performance space, giving full-scale touring shows room to land without the feel of an arena. The setting sits at the intersection of old Colfax recreation history and contemporary concert production.

A rink, a rock club, a return

Samuel Cohen’s Mammoth Skating Rink Company built the $32,000 rink in 1907, with Edwin H. Moorman designing the resort-like structure at Colfax and Clarkson. The building later served stints as an electric-car factory, a sports house, and a warehouse, but its sharpest musical turn came in 1969, when Stuart Green bought it and converted it into Mammoth Gardens with the aim of echoing Bill Graham’s San Francisco Fillmore. In a six-month burst, the room hosted the Grateful Dead, the Who, and Joe Cocker before it was boarded up in October 1970. A later Mammoth Gardens revival ended after fourteen months amid partner disagreements. Manuel and Magaly Fernandez then made the building a home for multicultural concerts and dances from 1986 through 1998. On May 19, 1999, it reopened as the Fillmore Auditorium with Trey Anastasio, under BGP Denver; Live Nation operates it today.

The room today

The booking mix runs through Latin, hip-hop, pop, alternative, indie, metal, R&B, and jazz, with national touring acts taking advantage of a large live-music setting and production infrastructure. Expect a main-room experience shaped by the expansive floor, with box seats positioned between the north and south mezzanines. A 2018 upgrade added floor tiers for clearer sightlines and large screens carrying a live stage feed, useful when a packed floor puts distance between the crowd and the performers.