A new 850-seat venue for comedy and music performances is opening on the edge of Capitol Hill and Navy Yard, at the old “Blue Castle” building on M Street SE. The former car barn, which dates back to the 1800s, has been fully converted into an industrial-style entertainment venue.

Capital Turnaround, which opens to the public with its first act in August, was slated to open last year but had to keep its lights off due to the pandemic — aside from a handful of “micro-weddings” and private events the space held over the past year.

The venue is owned by National Community Church, the religious organization that’s behind the DC Dream Center, Miracle Theatre, and Ebenezers Coffeehouse.

Union Stage runs the booking for NCC, including its Miracle Theatre and Capital Turnaround lineups. Jon Weiss, Union Stage’s talent buyer, says he started booking the room in November 2019. The first show, a sold-out live podcast, was scheduled for March 2020 until it was canceled.

But the venue’s first slate of performers is now set, starting with back-to-back sets from comedian Hannibal Buress on Aug. 7 — one at 7 p.m. and another at 10 p.m. — followed by the True Crime Obsessed live podcast on Sept. 17. Other acts, like Story District DC (Sept. 25), Todd Rundgren (Oct. 17 and 18), Steve-O (Dec. 4), and Rina Sawayama (May 6, 2022), round out the lineup.

Weiss says there will be at least two bars in the space, and he’s still booking acts to fill up the schedule. While there will be plenty of 21 and older shows, Weiss says the venue will also host a wide range of all-ages events, a salute to the teens that frequented D.C.’s punk scene in previous decades.

“We don’t just want to be providing for the community that drinks,” says Weiss. “We want to be providing for every community, for every type of genre and demographic.”

Weiss, who grew up in the D.C. area and is a musician himself, runs the local independent record company Babe City Records while booking for Union Stage, Miracle Theatre, Jammin Java, and Pie Shop. He sees Capital Turnaround joining venues like The Anthem and 9:30 Club as a go-to entertainment spot in the District and says he’s tired of seeing artists fly in from around the world only to play shows in New York and Los Angeles.

“In a city where rent is increasingly pushing the arts out of the District and into the suburbs, it’s nice to see something that is providing a space for art and touring artists to provide entertainment to D.C., directly in D.C.,” Weiss says. “Our goal is … just providing D.C. as more of an arts-centered, entertainment city.”

Built in 1862, the building itself takes up an entire city block and has quite an interesting history. Located directly across from the main Navy Yard gate, the building was once the last stop along the city’s busiest streetcar line that started in Georgetown, according to HillRag. The Washington and Georgetown Railroad Car House — or the Navy Yard Car Barn — quite literally “turned around” cars to prepare them for another journey across the city.

In the past, the building has been the site of D.C. public charter schools, and the church bought it in 2014, when it was a loading dock.

Now NCC is getting rid of its signature blue paint and has retrofitted it with spacious, contemporary lounges, green rooms for performers (and bridal parties getting ready for wedding ceremonies), exposed brick, and LED screens. (It’s worth taking a virtual tour of the venue here.)

It’s not all about the entertainment, though. Part of the building is being used by the Phase Family Learning Center, a full-service preschool for children ages 6 weeks to 5 years old.

Asked about the optics of a religious group opening a venue that books the likes of, well, Steve-O, National Community Church’s lead pastor Mark Batterson doesn’t bat an eye.

First, he says, “every business venture … someone’s behind it.” In NCC’s case, the profits made from selling tickets and coffee go back into their youth programs, Batterson says.

But the 25-year-old church also isn’t very conventional — the congregation holds its Sunday services at theaters around D.C., including Capital Turnaround and Lincoln Theatre. (Pre-pandemic, NCC operated out of seven campuses, Batterson says.)

“For some people, I guess you would say we’re not your mother’s church,” Batterson says. “I mean, Jesus didn’t just hang out at the synagogue. He hung out at wells, the natural gathering places in ancient culture. To us, movie theaters, or concert venues, or coffee houses are those modern-day wells. We love being in places and spaces where church and community can cross paths.”

Weiss, the talent buyer, hopes the new venue will have a direct impact on the nearby neighborhoods, especially after such a tough year. He cites a statistic he read in The Chicago Tribune: Every $1 spent on small performance venues generates $12 of economic activity within the surrounding businesses. He believes Capital Turnaround can have that type of influence, especially if he can book some big names going forward.

“It’s nice to be able to have another reason for artists to focus on D.C. as another primary market for music,” he says. “I like being able to say, ‘Hey, if you’re playing New York, you’re going to want to play D.C., too.”

Capital Turnaround, 770 M St. SE; tickets on unionstage.com

This post has been updated with information about Capital Turnaround’s first show in August.