Venue: Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
Town: San Francisco, US
Capacity: 7,000

The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (formerly San Francisco Civic Auditorium and San Francisco Exposition Auditorium) is a multi-purpose arena in San Francisco, California, named after promoter Bill Graham. The arena holds 8,500 people. The auditorium was designed by renowned Bay Area architects John Galen Howard, Frederick Herman Meyer and John W. Reid Jr. and built in 1915 as part of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The auditorium hosted the 1920 Democratic National Convention, the San Francisco Opera from 1923 to 1932 and again for the 1996 season, and the National AAU boxing trials in 1948. It was the home of the San Francisco Warriors of the National Basketball Association from 1964 to 1967. An underground expansion, named Brooks Hall, was completed in 1958 under the Civic Center Plaza, immediately north of the Civic Auditorium. The famous Mother of All Demos was presented here during the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, and the World Cyber Games 2004 were also held here. In 1992, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to rename the auditorium after the rock concert impresario Bill Graham, who had died the previous year in a helicopter crash. Long before Bill Graham came along, James T. Graham (no relation) managed the Civic Auditorium from 1954 to 1970 and booked some of the biggest names in show business there. During Jim Graham's tenure, the Civic Auditorium hosted Elvis Presley (October 26, 1957), Judy Garland (September 13, 1961), Ray Charles, the Tijuana Brass, Donovan, the Jefferson Airplane (June 4, 1966), the Mamas and the Papas (October 10, 1966), The Temptations and Gladys Knight & the Pips (January 26, 1968), Jose Feliciano, Bobby Darin and more, which prompted San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen to opine that the Board of Supervisors had named the Civic Auditorium after the wrong Graham (January 12, 1993). Jim Graham signed the Warriors to a contract at the Civic in 1962 when they first moved from Philadelphia to San Fran