Wrightsel Music Hall: A 19th-Century Church Reborn as a Concert Space

Columbus has a new old music room. CAPA — the long-time steward of the city's performing-arts infrastructure — has renamed the former Central Presbyterian Church the Wrightsel Music Hall, planning to use the building's natural acoustics to host concerts and community events. Most of the structure was completed in 1859, and CAPA's stated intent is to preserve the bones of the original space while adapting it to a 21st-century programming calendar.

This kind of adaptive reuse is one of the genuinely encouraging stories in American small-venue programming. Historic religious buildings are typically over-engineered for sound in ways no contemporary commercial venue would tolerate: stone or heavy plaster walls, lofted wood ceilings, intentional reverberation tuned for unamplified human voice and organ. Those choices, made by 19th-century builders for entirely different reasons, happen to be exactly what acoustic chamber music, choral programs, and intimate amplified performance want today. You couldn't afford to build it new. You can absolutely afford to keep it standing.

The risk in conversions like this is over-treating the space. The instinct to chase a clean, dry sound — modern foam, acoustic panels, dampening on every reflective surface — can quickly strip the magic and leave you with a competent but generic black-box. The venues that get this right tend to be the ones with a programming director who trusts the room: take the long reverberation as a feature rather than a bug, program accordingly, and reserve mitigation for genuinely problematic frequencies rather than wholesale treatment.

CAPA has the institutional muscle to do this well. If they thread the needle, Wrightsel becomes a destination room that adds something Columbus doesn't currently have — a small, acoustically alive hall in the heart of downtown. Worth a visit when it opens.

[Read the full piece](https://www.dispatch.com/picture-gallery/entertainment/2026/05/14/wrightsel-music-hall-capa-central-presbyterian-church/90078841007/)