X Football City Diner at 1300 Battery Street

• EventX Football City Diner
• WeekSuper Bowl LX
• Venue1300 Battery Street, closed eight months
• Brands in the roomX, xAI, Tesla, Starlink
• ProjectorsFour, floor and walls
• CrewThirteen

The venue had been shut for eight months

The diner at 1300 Battery Street traded for forty years and closed for good in May 2025, and by the time this event went in nobody had run a service there since.

That cuts both ways. An empty building means no trading hours to work around and nobody telling you where you can’t put a truss, and it also means nothing in the room is ready. Power, rigging points, sightlines and the look all start from zero, and a week out from the Super Bowl is not when you want to discover what a building can’t do.

The room had to be dark at midday

You can’t judge a projection map, a floor logo or a lighting state against daylight coming through a restaurant’s windows. The whole space was blacked out from the outside so it stayed dark through the middle of the day, and every projected image in the room depended on that. The blackout had to be finished before anything else could be assessed. It’s the least visible part of the build and it gates everything after it.

Four projectors, on the floor and the walls

Two of them put logos on the floor while two more ran content across the walls, including replays of football games.

Mapping a floor is harder than mapping a wall, because people stand on it and the image has to survive being walked through. Anything rigged above it also has to clear the room’s own ceiling, which in a converted restaurant is a low number.

What it looked like when it was finished

LED lighting ran around the edges of the room, with strip lights and tube lights above it and a twinkling-light ceiling over the whole thing. The bar was lit blue. Panel seating was set in the round, and wall screens carried content of their own.

The brief was a diner turned into a sports lounge for a week. That’s a production design job before it’s an AV job, and the two have to be drawn at the same time or the kit ends up somewhere the design didn’t allow for.

Audio for a panel, and one night with a presentation

A room like this is hostile to speech. Hard surfaces, a bar running, people standing and talking through the quiet parts. An A1, the lead audio engineer, ran the audio with wireless microphones for the panel, and one night carried a presentation, so the same position covered that too.

None of that is fixed by turning anything up, so panel audio in a restaurant comes down to microphone choice and placement.

Who was on site

Our team was thirteen people, by role:

• An executive producer, a producer and a production coordinator
• A production designer and three art assistants
• An A1 on audio and a V1 on video
• A lighting tech, a grip and a rigger
• A production assistant

Four of those thirteen are art department. That’s the tell for what this job actually was: the design and the build were the larger half, and the AV had to work inside what the design decided.

What made it hard

The date couldn’t move. The venue needed a build rather than a load-in. Nothing about the look could be judged until the blackout was done. None of those is unusual on its own, but stacked into one week, in a city that busy, they’re the job. William Cook called it pretty gnarly and pretty stressful, and a cool event.

If you’re taking over an empty venue

Walk it with power and rigging in mind before you fall in love with the space. This is the part of live event production that happens weeks before anyone sees a room. A closed building gives you freedom and no infrastructure, so the walk is really an inventory of what is missing.

Then settle the light before anything else. If the room has to be dark, the blackout is the first thing built and the last thing you can afford to be still fixing.

Westwave AV is based in San Francisco and works across the Bay Area.