Weber State's public venues

The Browning Center is the busiest public building on campus. It opened in the 1960s as the Fine Arts Center, its address is 3950 West Campus Drive, and its phone number is 801-626-7015. The university runs more than 200 events and around 80,000 guests a year through it, more foot traffic than most rooms downtown see, and it holds three separate performance venues.

The Austad Auditorium seats 1,408, and the university calls it the crown jewel of its performance venues. The Allred Theater seats 272 and is the main home of the theatre and dance programs, recently rebuilt with new sound and LED lighting. The Eccles Theater is a small, flexible space for experimental and intimate work, and the university publishes no seating figure for it.

The Browning name turns up twice in this city. It is on this building and on the John M. Browning Firearms Museum inside Union Station downtown, and the company that carries the name is headquartered over the county line in Morgan. One family, on an auditorium on the bench and a museum at the bottom of the hill.

The Dee Events Center is the university's arena and the largest north of Salt Lake City, a circular, domed room seating 11,592 that opened in 1977. Weber State gives its address as 4444 Event Center Drive, Ogden, with a phone number of 801-626-6667. It is home to the Wildcat men's and women's basketball teams and hosts Big Sky championships, NCAA tournament games, and community and religious events across the year.

It is also rentable by the public, through an online system the university calls Book the Dee. A room this size available to hire is part of why Ogden lands events well above the weight of a city its size.

One address wrinkle is worth knowing. Ticketing sites often list the arena at 4400 Harrison Boulevard, while the university uses 4444 Event Center Drive. They are the same building, because Event Center Drive runs off Harrison, and the university's address is the one to trust.

Stewart Stadium is the outdoor venue, home to Weber State's Big Sky football team along with track and field and volleyball. It was built in the 1950s when the college moved to this campus, with little seating on the east side, and the west stands were added in 1966 to make it a full stadium.

Weber State Athletics lists the stadium at about 13,400 seats today. That is down from a larger figure: a 2023 renovation of the east stands rebuilt that side and reduced the total. Premium seating sits in a sky suites and press box complex added in 2001, with 26 suites and club seats over the top floors, and the field, track and lighting have been replaced in the years since.

Football runs in the fall, roughly September into November. The home schedule is set each year, so the reliable place for dates and tickets is the Weber State Athletics site rather than any fixed list here.

The Shaw Gallery is free, open to the public, and it validates visitor parking, which makes it the one venue on this campus that solves the parking rule for you. It sits in the Ethel Wattis Kimball Visual Arts Center, and its hours are Monday to Friday 11 to 5 and Saturday 11 to 3, with evening hours from 5 to 9 during Ogden's First Friday gallery stroll in October, November, February, March and April.

Those five evening dates are the interesting part. A campus gallery that opens late to join a downtown art walk is a deliberate tie between the university on the bench and the galleries at the bottom of the hill, and it is the only campus building here that keeps downtown hours.

The thing to plan around is the calendar, not the clock. The gallery closes for university breaks and holidays, closes for the whole summer semester, and closes between exhibitions to rotate work. In midsummer it is usually shut, so check the exhibition calendar before you drive up, because the posted hours only mean something when a show is hanging.

This entry mostly exists to correct an assumption. The Ott Planetarium is a teaching classroom first, a 60 seat dome used for university astronomy courses, and it is closed to the public most of the time. Public access is limited to scheduled free events, and group visits are arranged in advance by email at [email protected].

The observatory is a separate facility, and it works differently. It runs free public star parties roughly once a month during fall and spring semesters, and it can be reserved from 100 dollars an hour, with a one hour minimum, for a private group with staff help and access to the telescopes.

So do not treat the planetarium as a drop in attraction. A visitor arriving unannounced on a weekday afternoon finds a classroom. The two ways in are a free public event or a booked group visit. For dark skies proper, Weber County has a designated dark sky park at North Fork Park up in the Ogden Valley, a different proposition outdoors and at altitude, covered on the bench page.

This is the most useful thing on the page. Weber State requires every vehicle entering and parking on campus from 7 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, to have a valid permit or pay at a meter or the hourly pay lot. That applies to a visitor going to a gallery, a lecture or a meeting just as much as to anyone else.

The prices are modest. A temporary visitor permit is 4 dollars a day or 12 dollars a week. The pay lot charges 3 dollars for the first hour and a dollar for each hour after. Permits are bought online, or at the drive up visitor information booth on Dixon Drive just south of the 3850 South entrance.

There are two clean ways round it. Come outside the enforced window, meaning after 4 in the afternoon or on a weekend, which covers almost every evening performance and Saturday game. Or ride the OGX bus from Ogden Central Station, which runs through campus and is zero fare until Spring Change Day 2028. And the Shaw Gallery validates parking for its visitors, the one venue that takes the question off your hands.

The reason people think campus parking is free is that evenings and weekends genuinely are unmetered, and most visits are an evening concert or a Saturday game. That advice is right at 7 in the evening and wrong at 11 in the morning.