New places may feel a dime a dozen in our chameleon city, but two specific approaches at Cherrywood Center and Downtown Austin Space Activation are giving preexisting buildings a new lease on life – pun intended. By making the most of what’s in front of them and helping others to do the same, leaders in both spaces hope to build genuine connection between buildings and the people who gather in them.
Longtime Community Space Expands Into DIY Venue
Chase Weinacht took over as Cherrywood Center’s campus manager and booking coordinator last March and began slowly transforming the building’s two reverberant rooms as DIY stages for local bands. The musician was already well-acquainted with the hall’s many multipurpose rooms, having spent years working at Spilled Milk Social Club, an afterschool program hosted in the center. In September 2025, his band, Feeling Small, led the charge, hosting a free, all-ages, Monday night series, New Songs in the Old Hall, inviting friends and collaborators to join.
“I think that alternative spaces are a more interesting space to see a show and perform a show,” Weinacht says. “There’s something about having to deal with a puzzle as a band or as a show-thrower or an audience member that is just more exciting.”
The multi-story ranch-style building at 1605 E. 38th 1/2, built in 1949, has long been owned by the United Methodist Church. Throughout the years, the space’s managers have adapted to the needs of the neighborhood’s residents, becoming home to several small businesses in addition to long-running recovery meetings and two non-denominational congregations.
“It’s already been an event space for a while, so it feels more stable,” says alexalone songwriter Alex Peterson, whose December show with Virginia Creeper was the first I got to see in the newly established venue space. Spread out in front of the chapel’s spacious sanctuary, Peterson gathered a rare eightpiece lineup for the occasion, leaning into the room’s echoing acoustics – befitting of the project’s tonally precise, dissonance-loving rock sound. In between sets, friends and fans passed around cookies and convivial conversations at the back of the congregation space and in the hall’s antechambers, becoming yet another community at home in the storied community space.
“Once shows started happening, more people started being aware that it existed in the first place,” Peterson says, illustrating Weinacht’s hope that new visitors catching a show will imagine performing there themselves – or hosting their dance lessons, their graduation party, or their neighborhood meet-up in its well-loved, wood-trimmed halls.
“When there’s so much change constantly around us, it’s refreshing to go into a space that’s been here longer than all of the condos and re-infuse some energy into it from folks of a younger generation,” says Weinacht. “There’s something about holding on to a thing and making it sustainable that is a challenge in our constant-turnover city.”
Lab Fifty6 Helps Downtown Hopefuls Ideate
A couple of miles closer to Lady Bird Lake, Downtown Austin Alliance’s DASA just cut the ribbon on their latest activation in a vacant office space. Lab Fifty6, a co-working space whose front lobby doubles as a small-scale performance venue and art gallery, will hang out at 506 Congress until May, making use of a short-term lease to bring entrepreneurs and creatives to the area and help them imagine Downtown as a part of their future.
“When we talk about what this place means, I think we are really trying to express an idea of what human community can mean when it’s a collective effort to think about the idea of what a revitalized Downtown can be,” says Lab Fifty6 co-founder Steve Hatchett. The professional gathering place offers conference rooms and individual co-working memberships for work-from-home folks craving community and for would-be business owners to meaningfully connect with the city center.
“Some things you have to touch and you have to build that personal relationship with, and you can’t do that if you’re not in the district and you don’t feel the vibe and energy Downtown,” says Jenell Moffett, DAA’s senior vice president of economic development, marketing, and strategic communications. She, and the team at Lab Fifty6 and DAA, hope that creating spaces for folks to work from Downtown – before buying into a second location, a new storefront, or an office space – will help them determine how they can fit into the district’s distinct structure.
“It’s unlike locating in any other place in the city,” says Moffett, pointing out the fluctuating operating hours and increased foot traffic activated by the multi-use blocks. Wherever it travels, Lab Fifty6’s thoughtfully rooted concept aims to bring varied creators together in the complicated heart of our city.
“It’s almost like Downtown is mentoring the business,” laughs Moffett.
Chris Teague plays live at Lab Fifty6 on Saturday, Feb. 28.
This article appears in February 27 • 2026.