Banking on Roanoke and the surrounding region’s support of indoor live music, The Exchange gives new life to a century-old bank and aims to make Roanoke a tour stop for performers that thrive in large standing room only venues.
There’s something holy about repurposing an epic-sized temple of capitalism built in the roaring twenties Gatsby-era during the peak of Roanoke’s railroad boom into a modern day concert venue tailor made for general admission shows and bustling standing room performances.
The National Exchange Bank building had been vacant for nearly a decade when Lucas Thorton bought the building for $10,000,000 four years ago. He brought in Across the Way Productions (Floydfest), and local restaurateur and musician JP Powell, and they reimagined the 55,000 square feet of open space and mezzanine as a place to be dedicated to 1,200 show-goers watching, head-bobbing and dancing the night away in an inspired setting, all focused towards a stage engineered for amplified music from a live band on a sold-out show night.
All while keeping the integrity of the elegant and historic architecture and decoration intact, and housing Suerte! , a Spanish-inspired restaurant and wine bar and the 27 room Promissory boutique hotel.
“The building has beautiful vaults that will become green rooms or speakeasy-style hangouts. There’s an old banker’s office off the mezzanine we want to turn into a swanky, hidden bar—somewhere people can slip away and then rejoin the show,” said Sam Calhoun, COO of Across the Way Productions, the same company that curates and operates Floydfest and now The Exchange Music Hall.
“It’s all about the details, from bar design to bartender attire, to how we frame and present the shows, to how the marketing feels,” he said.
The Exchange is a vision of gilded age Gatsby flair inside gargantuan-sized columned classical grandeur on a foundation of granite and marble meant to promote faith in the business of savings and loans. Citizens of ancient Rome or Athens would surely recognize the use of architecture to encourage community gathering, with their inspired columns towering over their celebrations in those elevated arts and culture centers and times.
“All of us believe this could be something huge for Roanoke, which is emerging as a live-music city,” said Calhoun, well versed due to his experience with Floydfest, the longstanding local gem of outdoor live performance and art for the region. The five-day festival recently endured the departure of founder Kris Hodges and a year off in 2023 due to difficulties over a site change. The past two years have sold-out with a capped ticket capacity of 10,000.
“We’ve been talent-buying for 25 years. We know the missing pieces in Roanoke’s music scene, and The Exchange is truly going to fill a niche we’ve needed for years — if not decades,” Calhoun said.
“We’ve had bands pass us by simply because we didn’t have the right venue, and now The Exchange is going to be that missing piece that brings a different level of talent to Roanoke.”
Roanoke and Southwest Virginia have an unusually high density of locally-owned independent music venues, while Live Nation and AEG music groups have a near monopoly on the industry nationwide, something Calhoun believes we should be proud of as a region.
What’s was missing in Roanoke is a music hall in the region with 1,000 person plus capacity that can afford to bring in larger acts that play similar-sized East Coast cities.
Sidewinders is next door to The Exchange with a capacity listed at 750, with Corned Beef across the street at 150, and Martin’s a few blocks away at 250. All are long-time bastions of live music, but in the restaurant bar model, with the stage not necessarily the main attraction. Five Points Sanctuary is an excellent live music haven in town and a beautiful repurposed church without the pews but with a balcony that showcases both local and traveling acts, and caps out at 250. The Spot on Kirk also delivers excellent local and traveling acts holding an intimate 130 tucked in on the quiet block beside Lucky restaurant.
The Jefferson Center seats 925, but like most theaters, is not suited for shows where an audience wants to move, sway, order at the bar, or stand in the back. This is a common modern dilemma for historic theaters and auditoriums, with showgoers more familiar with the freedom of general admission offered by music festivals. The Harvester in Rocky Mount (750 cap), The Lyric in Blacksburg (477 cap) and The Grandin (319 cap) in Roanoke are beautifully built rooms, but seated. Seats and quiet listening work well to enhance the subtleties of jazz, classical, bluegrass, movies, and stand-up comedy, but not so much for a rock, funk, or hip hop act where the musical energy is often meant to move you physically as much as internally.
“We are primarily a standing-room-only venue. The mezzanine will have cocktail or bistro tables for people who want seating, but the main floor is standing room. It creates a completely different energy than theater seating,” Calhoun said.
Legendary music venues such as Asheville’s Orange Peel (1050 cap) and DC’s 9:30 Club (1200 cap.) are standing room only, with that energy also attracting repeat high-end performers and loyal audiences. For a performer on stage, seeing the majority of a 1000+ audience on their feet directly in front of you can be more of an intimate and shared musical experience, even in an olympic gymnasium sized hall, when compared to a seated theater with less capacity. Arenas like the Berglund Center (10,600 cap) can also lack the intimacy with focus directed towards a jumbotron than the distant players.
Calhoun says Across the Way and Floydfest’s long success in curating masterful performers is built upon relationships with the musicians and the audience through the venue.
“We’ve always been artist-forward. Touring is grueling, so when artists arrive at FloydFest, we want them to feel welcomed—with beautiful backstage spaces, timber-frame stages, and an attentive audience, and The Exchange will be the same” Calhoun said.
Excellent sound quality is essential to the success of any performance, both for the audience and the performers. Developer Lucas Thorton said sound design was a focus from the start.
“It’s a beautiful space but it has a lot of plaster and glass. Figuring out how to control the sound—bringing the highs down, keeping the lows from getting buried—has been a big effort. Because I’m working with “music men,” as I call them, everyone understands that looking great isn’t enough. If it doesn’t sound great, no one cares how pretty it is.”
He added: “Especially in Roanoke, where we want to attract touring acts—we might get them on a Tuesday or Wednesday between Nashville and D.C. or Charlotte and D.C. We’ll get them because we have a beautiful hall that also sounds really great. If the sound isn’t excellent, they’ll pass us over.”
Calhoun said the details are being finalized on a multiyear agreement with Across the Way for booking the “lobby space”, and praised the initial synergy between The Exchange, Promissory Hotel, and Suerte! restaurant.
After the New Years Eve opening with Grace Potter and Holy Roller, the building will be closed for a couple of months while the restaurant opens.
A re-grand opening will start a consistent concert calendar.
“While we’ll have major touring shows—maybe seven to ten of that scale the first year—we’ll also feature regional and local bands. Purposeful programming is core to FloydFest, and it continues here. We’re not Live Nation; we don’t just throw things at the wall. We want synergy with downtown.”
“For example, Parkway Brewing is opening across the street. Why not coordinate—have their outdoor band play early, then host a later show inside The Exchange? Plenty of opportunities for collaboration.”
Calhoun and Thorton are realistic when asked of the bands they envision playing The Exchange.
“It’s all about relationships—using our FloydFest connections to book the right talent. Our joke for years has been: ‘We get them on the way up or the way down.’ Now it’s almost a badge of honor. We find artists early, before they become too expensive or mainstream, and introduce audiences to their next favorite band,” Calhoun said.
Thornton is not booking the bands, but music inspired him to build the venue. “Going to concerts was a big part of my youth, my first ones were around age 14 or 15. Back then Roanoke got a surprising number of major bands. I saw Stone Temple Pilots, Metallica, Bush—those grunge-era bands all came through. I don’t know how many still stop in Roanoke or at the Berglund today, but that experience definitely informed how I think about a space like ours. The architecture has a sense of drama, and a performance hall just felt right. I don’t know yet how some of those heavier rock bands will sound in our hall, but I’m eager to find out,” Thornton said.
“Eddie Vedder would be a dream—just need a million-dollar guarantee! So far I haven’t found that lying around.”
Grace Potter played Floydfest in 2010 and 2015 and the inaugural event with Holy Roller from Richmond opening The Exchange on December 31, 2025 to a sold-out audience of 1200.
