The Church That Ani Saved: Asbury Hall and the 9th Ward at Babeville

Walk into Asbury Hall on a show night and try not to look up. You'll fail. The ceiling is 45 feet overhead, arched trusses crossing it like rigging, a U-shaped balcony hugging the room and original stained glass throwing colored light down onto a thousand-plus people who came for a rock show and got a cathedral. That's the trick of the best concert hall in Buffalo: it was never built to be one.

The building is a 1874 Gothic Revival Methodist church — the old Asbury Delaware Methodist Church, Medina sandstone, the real thing. By 2000 it was staring down demolition, and Ani DiFranco and her manager Scot Fisher bought it from the city rather than watch a wrecking ball take it. They spent years turning a condemned church into a venue, and opened Babeville to the public in 2007. The 1,200-cap main hall, Asbury Hall, became — by acclamation — one of the most beautiful rooms to see music anywhere in Western New York.

Fisher has always been clear that beauty was never the point on its own. "You can spend more than $10 million fixing up a building," he's said, "but if it doesn't sound good, you've wasted your money." It sounds good. That's the whole ballgame. And he's just as clear about why the doors opened at all: "This is a place for people to assemble, to experience art, and to feel fellowship." You can feel that mission in the room — an old church still doing what churches do, minus the sermon.

Downstairs is the part scene-heads love most. In the stone basement sits the 9th Ward — a roughly 150-cap room named for the Katrina-devastated New Orleans neighborhood, and functionally the launching pad of the whole building. It's where an emerging act plays its first Buffalo show before, ideally, graduating up the stairs to Asbury Hall. One address, two rooms, an entire career arc: break in the basement, headline the cathedral.

That vertical pipeline is what makes Babeville special beyond the Instagram-bait architecture. Most towns make you drive across the city to watch a band level up. Buffalo built it into a single Gothic footprint on Delaware Avenue — the intimate room feeding the grand one, both under the same 150-year-old roof that a folk singer refused to let the city tear down.

So go for a show, any show, in either room. Buy the merch, tip the bar, and take a second to look up at that stained glass and remember it was nearly rubble. Some cities lose their landmarks. Buffalo turned one into the best-sounding church you'll ever scream in.

Sources: Babeville: Buffalo's Angelic Concert Hall; Asbury Hall