CLEVELAND, Ohio — After 31 years of honoring live music, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is finally getting a stage built for the job. The museum’s $135 million expansion opens to the public on Saturday, November 22, with a community day, adding 50,000 square feet and the first dedicated indoor music venue in the museum’s history, according to Cleveland Magazine. The Rock Hall confirms on its own expansion page that the new wing opens in November 2026.
The centerpiece is Baker Hall, an oval-shaped venue that Cleveland Magazine reports will host up to 1,400 people for concerts and private events. It closes a striking gap: the Rock Hall has inducted generations of performers without ever having a purpose-built indoor concert room of its own.
Visitors will feel the change before they see a single exhibit. The museum’s entrance moves into the new building, just steps from Erieside Avenue, where the Haslam Atrium — named following a $10 million donation from Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam, according to Cleveland Magazine — creates a grand entryway with tall windows revealing views of Lake Erie and the original glass pyramid. From there, guests flow down to the main exhibit level and then rise through the pyramid as they always have.
Outside, the expansion reaches toward the lake. The Taylor Family Community Park creates a public space between the museum and the Great Lakes Science Center, will be managed by Cleveland Metroparks and will connect to the recently finished Mandel Community Trail. Above it, a green roof helps reduce stormwater runoff, while a deep lake water cooling system — described by Cleveland Magazine as a first of its kind for Northeast Ohio and Lake Erie — will keep the campus cool in summer.
The need for the new building was baked into the old one’s fame. The Rock Hall opened in 1995 in architect I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, and Cleveland Magazine recounts how neither acoustics nor a stage figured into that original design: an indoor stage existed at all only because MTV’s Live at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame series, which aired from 2001 to 2003, left a temporary platform behind in the lobby. Over the past decade, most of the museum’s consequential concerts moved outdoors to its plaza stage.
The road here ran through the museum’s “Museum 2.0” era: plaza letters and an outdoor stage in 2016, an improved Connor Theater in 2017 and The Garage, its interactive jam room, in 2019, according to Cleveland Magazine. The expansion broke ground in October 2023, Cleveland Scene reported, and museum president and CEO Greg Harris told Cleveland Magazine, “We are a museum that’s dedicated to the living, breathing art form of rock ‘n’ roll, and live music is important to that.”
Architecturally, the new building is a deliberate collision with the old one. Designed by the New York-based firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, the low triangular addition sits beside Pei’s even pyramid, according to Cleveland Magazine. Inside, a muddy line on a shared wall — marking where soil and stone once filled an underused hill between the museum and the science center — is being left in place on purpose. “It’s a record of what was there. It’s not supposed to feel precious,” expansion architect Vishaan Chakrabarti told Cleveland Magazine.
The expansion is also built for students and neighbors, not just tourists. Cleveland Magazine reported that three classroom spaces in the new Howley Family Education Center were being readied for field trips and community programs starting in January, and the Rock Hall says the wing serves the tens of thousands of K-12 students who visit each year, alongside free, un-ticketed public space. Cleveland Scene reported the building will be the Rock Hall’s more public-facing community space, mostly free to enter, and that 95 percent of the cash raised came from local donors.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on. Confirmed: the price tag is $135 million, the addition is 50,000 square feet, it was designed by Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, and it opens November 22 with a community day, per Cleveland Magazine, Cleveland Scene and the Rock Hall itself. Still waiting: a published lineup of the first Baker Hall concerts, and a final word on capacity in each configuration — Cleveland Magazine put the figure at up to 1,400 people, while Cleveland Scene’s tour report put it at up to 850, a difference the museum has not yet spelled out.
What happens next begins the moment the doors open. Immediately after the debut, the museum embarks on a complete rethinking of its main exhibit hall, led by TAIT, a Pennsylvania production company, according to Cleveland Magazine; that project gains more than 10,000 additional square feet on the lower level, including a room for large-scale touring exhibits. Education programs in the new classrooms follow in January.
The wider calendar keeps moving, too: this year’s induction ceremony takes place November 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, and the ceremony returns to Cleveland in late 2027.
For Clevelanders, though, the date that matters is November 22. A museum that has spent three decades proving rock ‘n’ roll belongs on the lakefront will open a bigger front door onto it — and, for the first time, a concert hall of its own behind it.
Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY