Update: The City Council on Tuesday approved these plans.
By next spring, the city of Long Beach hopes local music fans won’t have to sacrifice their gas money to see live music in the great outdoors.
The City Council is expected Tuesday to approve a $16.5 million plan for the construction and operation of the Long Beach Bowl, a temporary 10,000- to 12,000-seat amphitheater, in time for the 2026 music season.
This includes $1.5 million in start-up costs paid to event management company ASM Global, who will run the venue for $300,000 annually in a five-year contract, with the option to renew for an additional five years. The venue’s operating profits would be paid out to the city, along with a percentage of revenue from concessions, catering orders, private suites or lounges and potentially the sale of naming rights or sponsorships at the amphitheater.
In a separate recommendation, the council members will consider spending $14 million to fund the design, permitting, engineering and construction of the project — with the stipulation that ASM Global throw in an additional $1 million towards overall costs.
ASM Global already manages Long Beach’s convention center along with 13 amphitheaters nationwide, including the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and Dignity Health Amphitheatre in Bakersfield.
The agreement will cap months of planning by officials looking to fill the entertainment gap left behind by the 2023 closure of the FivePoint Amphitheatre in Irvine and help Long Beach reach the goal of becoming a year-round music destination for major pop, rock and classical concerts as well as community events.
“We’ve addressed some of the challenges in our Downtown, and now it’s ready to add some infusion of new economic activity, and the most immediate form is the amphitheater,” Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said. “Overnight, it will be a top-10 venue that can’t be ignored.”
Richardson originally unveiled the amphitheater at the conclusion of his State of the City address in January, setting its opening date in the fall. Officials have since pushed that to spring 2026.
The temporary amphitheater — planned to have a 10-year lifespan — will be built on a 5-acre site along Queens Highway adjacent to Harry Bridges Memorial Park and the Queen Mary ocean liner. The hope is a permanent amphitheater will eventually take its place.
Officials said work will commence in July, starting with $4 million to grade the land, repair the surrounding street and parking lots and pave additional dropoff lanes.
“We would have had to make those improvements, just because of the music festivals and all the other activities we’re having within the Queen Mary campus,” said Long Beach Economic Development Deputy Director Johnny Vallejo, who described the area’s asphalt to be in “very poor condition.”
“We can’t put up the amphitheater without doing those improvements,” he said.
Crews will purchase the materials for the stage and grandstands starting in May, with plans to begin building the venue in November. Vallejo said he hopes the venue’s main pieces — stage, grandstands and seating — can be finished as early as December and open in time for the 2026 concert schedule.
Once built, the Bowl will be an outdoor concert venue meant to hold 30 to 40 ticketed events annually — as well as 25 to 45 private events a year — with up to 270,000 ticketed attendees a year.
Renderings depict a semicircular stage and 10,000 to 11,000 seats — a mix of floor, grandstand and box seating — that draws its beauty from the surrounding views of the ocean, passing ships and city skyline. There will also be concession and hospitality offerings, new parking lots as well as an area for rideshare apps and bus shuttles to three city parking garages in Downtown Long Beach.
“It’s something that will add to our architectural legacy in our city,” Richardson said. “It’s something that’s going to add value and be aesthetically significant and something that our community will be proud of.”
City planners billed the Long Beach Bowl as a legacy venue, likening it to the 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl which draws 291,981 ticketed attendees annually.
This outpaces all of Long Beach’s music festivals combined, which together draw around 265,000 a year, as well as the 194,000 in attendance for the annual Long Beach Grand Prix.
Richardson hopes the venue will attract concertgoers and become a competitive force during an otherwise slow time of year for live events, according to a market analysis by the consulting firm AECOM that the city commissioned last year. It could also be the new spot for the Long Beach Symphony, Long Beach Jazz Festival and the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration.
The analysis found that within a 30-mile radius of Downtown Long Beach, there is a gap in 10,000 to 12,000-seat venues in the greater Los Angeles area, which ranks third in the nation for concert demand.
An amphitheater-style of venue, which usually sees peak attendance during the summer and early fall June to September, would complement the existing Long Beach Arena, which has most of its events in the late fall and early spring.
City staff also estimate the Bowl would be a boon to municipal revenue, projecting it could yield upwards of $32.2 million in profit for Long Beach — from operations, parking and taxes — in its first five years. Under these estimates, the city hopes to repay its construction costs in the first three to five years and make $42 million in profits in the amphitheater’s 10-year lifespan.
Based on their projections of the temporary venue’s success, officials said they have already begun talks to plan for its eventual replacement with a permanent amphitheater.
This comes as Richardson and the city are under increasing pressure to replace declining revenue from oil extraction that has already led to multi-million dollar shortfalls in the city’s budget.
Richardson has promised to fill that gap by growing local industries like high-tech manufacturing, aerospace, entertainment and tourism.
“We have a little bit of a transition on our hands,” Richardson said.” The way we’ve generated revenue is changing, fundamentally,” Richardson said. “And there are some things that we have to do in the next few years.”