AN ARTIST’S RENDERING OF CITIZENS LIVE AT THE WYLIE. IMAGE COURTESY LIVE NATION

A new concert venue is set to open next year — and it’ll sit right in the heart of the city.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held this morning to formally announce the new venue, dubbed Citizens Live at the Wylie. a 4,000-capacity entertainment venue designed for concerts, comedy shows and more. The venue in the Lower Hill District will be built on a portion of the former Civic Arena site (between Wylie and Bedford avenues), within walking distance of PPG Paints Arena.

The venue is being developed by Live Nation and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Tom Loudermilk, the Pittsburgh market president for Live Nation, says the venue will aim for flexibility and diversity.

“We’re going to have the ability to do scaled-down shows, seated shows, cabaret shows. It’ll have a lot of different configurations and setups. The whole goal of the place is to be very flexible — to get as many different types of acts as we can bring.”

That variety of configurations, Loudermilk says, will allow Citizens Live at the Wylie to cater to a range of sounds and genres. “I see this place doing comedy, R&B, country, rock, hip-hop, EDM. I don’t want to leave a genre out.”

At a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday morning, Lt. Gov. Austin Davis touted the impact of the new venue on the neighborhood. “It’s important that the workforce on these projects be reflective of the neighborhood and the communities in which they’re located,” Davis said. “The economic impact of this project is going to be huge — not just for the Hill District and the city of Pittsburgh, but for our entire region … it’s being built with union labor, and it’s part of a program to create careers in the trades for underrepresented groups.

“This is what it looks like when community leaders, business leaders and public officials come together and work together.”

Citizens is the “name-in-title partner” for the new venue, having previously worked with Live Nation on venues in Boston. Mark Rendulic, Citizen’s Pittsburgh market president and a native Pittsburgher, says that the venue will provide jobs and economic development — as well as music.

“This particular project means 350 new jobs will be added as a result of this particular facility. There’s a commitment to diversity, leveraging in particular minority contractors, in this historically African American community.”

A retail incubator at Citizens Live at the Wylie will host Hill District businesses, free of charge. The development of the venue also includes funds for new and ongoing community projects in the Hill District, including the revitalization of the New Grenada Theater.

“Local businesses will get the opportunity to get off the ground in this community,” Rendulic says. “That with the element of bringing an amazing new music venue … I think will be a real draw for the city.”

The venue will also have a big perk for regional Citizens customers: Anyone with one of the bank’s debit or credit cards will get to skip the line for entry, in addition to receiving pre-sale ticket offers.

Both Live Nation and Citizens spoke of a commitment to the history of the Hill District in conceiving and designing Citizens Live at the Wylie. “We took a lot of meetings with the various groups in the Hill,” Loudermilk says. “We spent a lot of time talking to the community there, because the whole goal of this space is not to be this sort of alien thing dropped into the center of a place — we want this to feel like it represents the community.”

“My father was a Duquesne music student, so he spent many a night up in the Hill playing jazz,” says Rendulic. “To be a part of that revitalization of the Hill with this project is pretty important to the city.”

As a centrally located venue with a fairly large capacity, the venue will aim to bring more national tours and artists to Pittsburgh. Loudermilk hopes that music fans will soon see more tours that might have once skipped from Philadelphia to Detroit or Chicago schedule stops in Pittsburgh.

“My experience is, venues like this one … attract more acts. Any time there’s an opening, there’s that initial honeymoon rush — everybody wants to come play the new venue. It’s our job, once we get them here, to really deliver. To make sure the artists have a fantastic time and the fans have a fantastic time. Hopefully, that means more artists coming back year in and year out.”

Construction on the site began in late 2024 and is expected to continue through the year. An opening date was not announced but is expected in mid-2026.