Grateful Dead at the Shea, Buffalo, 1979

Shea’s Theater in Buffalo originally opened as a movie theatre in the Roaring Twenties. Architecturally inspired by European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera palaces, it eventually fell into disrepair in the 1960s. A few years later the city took over the property when the owner failed to pay his taxes. At that point, a handful of committed individuals came together and saved the theater, wrangling grants to rehab the theatre. For its grand re-opening in the late '70s, Cab Calloway, who had played there when it first opened in 1926, performed for a sold-out audience. The Dead must have been one of the first bands to play the newly reopened Shea’s, helping the theater to enter a new era.