Winterland Ballroom — The Last Waltz

On Thanksgiving Day 1976, The Band performed their farewell concert at the Winterland Ballroom at 2000 Post Street in San Francisco — a show that Martin Scorsese filmed and released as The Last Waltz in 1978, one of the most celebrated concert films in cinema history. The performance was staged with unusual ambition: a formal dinner for 5,000 guests before the show, a set list that brought on a succession of guest performers including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, and Emmylou Harris, and a theatrical and cinematic production that was designed from the start with a film in mind. The Band played for more than four hours.

Winterland had been a significant San Francisco venue since the 1960s, an ice-skating rink converted to a concert hall by promoter Bill Graham that hosted the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the cream of the rock and blues world throughout the decade. The Last Waltz was its greatest moment — a concert that was simultaneously a genuine farewell, a historical document, and a piece of myth-making that The Band's internal contradictions (Robbie Robertson was ready to stop; Levon Helm was not) made more complicated than it appeared on screen. The film's glamour concealed real pain.

Winterland was demolished in 1986 and replaced by a residential development. The site at Post and Steiner in the Western Addition no longer bears any trace of the venue. A residential building occupies the address. The Last Waltz, however, survives in the way that only the best concert films do: as a document of musicians at a particular peak of their powers, in a room that no longer exists, playing together for what they believed was the last time.