Off Broadway

Off Broadway is a live music room in a converted brick garage on Lemp Avenue, and it has been putting bands on stage for something over thirty years. Since the mid-1980s it has been one of the fixed points of the St. Louis music scene: small enough that the audience stands close to the players, established enough that touring acts route through it.

Steve Pohlman, a St. Louis native, and his wife Kathryn Kellison bought the venue in 2006 when the previous owners stepped away, and have run it since – close to twenty years, including keeping it alive through the two years the pandemic kept it shut.

The list of bands that have played the room before they were famous is the venue’s real credential. Mumford and Sons played here on their first American visit and sold it out, to an audience that already knew every word. The Chicks have played the room. So have the Turnpike Troubadours, and American Aquarium, who once drew an audience of four here and now count their monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands.

The building suits the purpose – brick, unfussy, with a spacious patio and an upstairs lounge that give people somewhere to go between sets. Nothing about it is polished, and that is precisely the appeal.

Off Broadway sits in the Cherokee-Lemp district, a short walk from Cherokee Street and the antique shops, and it is the obvious way to spend an evening after a day among them.