Maura Johnston

Southpaw's wall of baseball cards, 2005. There are a couple of southpaws in there.

​Yesterday the news that the Park Slope club Southpaw would be turning into an educational center for children broke, and we got comment from co-owner Matt Roff—whose business interests also include Williamsburg's Public Assembly, Greenpoint's No Name Bar, and Crown Heights' Franklin Park—last night. Roff clarified that he and his business partner Mike Palms aren't selling the space; instead, they're subletting it to the company that will run the tutoring center. SOTC asked him a couple of questions on the past, present, and future of his venue and nightlife around New York. Our email chat with him is below.

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Georgia Kral/Flickr

Those Darlins play Southpaw in 2009.

​On Tuesday, a flare regarding the future of the Park Slope venue Southpaw went up via Twitter: "I cant believe I'm writing this but, Southpaw will be closing its doors for good Feb. 20th," wrote @TheGreatHustler, a member of the Park Slope venue's booking and marketing department. "The venue has been sold." The news spread online with the appropriate head-shakings and tsk-tskings and worried blog posts, but there was no official word from the venue's owners—the website was operating in business-as-usual mode—until today, when The Brooklyn Paper reported that the venue would be shutting down and the space would be transformed into one offering "academic tutoring and rock climbing for tots."

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via Facebook

The Gaslight Anthem at the Court Tavern.

​When word first started leaking out on Facebook that New Brunswick, N.J.'s Court Tavern had closed, an early response was, "Again? Is this a yearly occurrence now?" It wasn't as if the Court hadn't been in trouble before. A decade ago, management successfully fended off developers who wanted to build a high-rise on the land; thanks to local support, it remained stubbornly in place in the shadow of a gleaming 23-story structure. In 2009, the Court put out the word that it owed $26,000 in taxes; generous regulars and a gala benefit show headlined by the Smithereens and the Patti Smith Group, both of whom had New Brunswick roots, raised the money. At the end of 2011, club owner Bobby Albert gave an interview reflecting on 30 years of being located at 124 Church Street. The damned place seemed indestructible.

Sadly, confirmation came all too quickly. According to the Courier News, the Court closed "indefinitely" on Wednesday, January 18. (The booking agent had not been warned. Nor had local hardcore legends Ensign, who were scheduled to play a big show on Friday night.) The Court's website was subsequently updated with a statement: "As of January 17, 2012, The Court Tavern is indefately [sic] CLOSED. This is a very sad day for the music culture. Check the site or on facebook [sic] for updates. IT WILL BE MISSED !!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (The venue's Facebook group—as well as its MySpace and Tumblr—remain unchanged.)

The property is listed for sale on real estate website Loopnet—asking price $1.25 million—so the general consensus seems to be that "indefinitely" means "forever." If this is correct, the Court now takes its place next to the Melody Bar, the Roxy, Budapest Cocktail Lounge, Bowl-O-Drome, and Patrix on the list of now-shuttered music clubs that had once set up shop in New Brunswick.

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The store's interior in happier times.

​The Hospital Productions store at 60 E. Third Street is no more, according to reports by East Village Radio and EV Grieve (which has photos of the storefront bearing a "For Rent" sign). The store, a physical extension of Dominick Fernow's identically named label-cum-distro that served as a backdrop for uncompromisingly bleak, multi-format music shopping and intensely claustrophobic noise shows, closed its doors at the beginning of December. While the Hospital website makes no mention of the shuttering and does not indicate whether the store will resurface at a new locale, there are no indications that overall operations will cease; an email inquiry seeking comment was not returned by press time.

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Chris Becker

Beach Fossils at Bruar Falls in 2010.

​The Williamsburg bar/club Bruar Falls, founded by the proprietors of Cake Shop and the Library Bar, will "cease to exist on November 1," according to a statement posted by the founders. Proprietors of the venue, which opened in the spring of 2009, sent out the announcement just as the weekend was beginning; reasons for the club's demise include the old standby "creative differences," as well as a "hard-to-honor midnight curfew," and financial difficulties that cropped up, the statement says, in part because there are just way too many places in Williamsburg where one can see live music. ("It was soon apparent to us, however, that people in Williamsburg have lots of other options to see bands," said the statement. "We love and are inspired by these places, but really, between loft/warehouse parties and D.I.Y. spots, where you can bring in your own cheap beer, smoke inside and hit on the same people...we totally understand why it's hard to spend money at your local legit small club. It is difficult not to be a bit jealous of their freedom, but we have always worked hard to be in for the long haul.") The full text below.

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​Damon Dash—fallen hip-hop mogul, co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records—had a club not so long ago in Tribeca called DD172. SOTC alum Zach Baron referred to it as "gallery-cum-illegal-performance-space-cum-goofy-artless-takeoff-on-Warhol's-Factory," and the Observer called Dash a "Wannabe Warhol": "Sometimes the four-story warehouse is a sprawling art gallery; at other times, it's a photo studio, or an indie band's rehearsal space." To Tribecans, it was "a front" for a suspected unlicensed club, a nuisance, a disturbance.

DD172 hasn't been operational since June, when the Tribeca Citizen observed stuff being moved out of the space at 172 Duane Street. Yesterday, the quiet block where the club was located—located in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in New York—rippled with interest as the city brought legal action against the building's owners.

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Phillip Ritz / Flickr

​The downtown dive Don Hill's relaunched itself last year under the guidance of Nur Khan and Paul Sevigny, hosting celeb-studded semi-private shows starring Hole and the Dead Weather, as well as other open-to-the-public nights. (The pair also allegedly improved the bathrooms while keeping the grit and graffiti intact.) Hill, a longtime nightlife impresario who opened his eponymous club in 1993, passed away last month. Now comes word that the club's shutting down--effective immediately--with the Post getting the scoop directly from Khan:

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Photo via Bowery Boogie

​205, the Serge Becker (La Esquina, the Box) designed nightclub that stumbled out onto Chrystie Street sometime in the waning months of 2006, has been on vacation since the end of the summer. A sign outside promised that the club would reopen on September 10th. But Bowery Boogie stopped by there on a recent Saturday night at 11pm, and the gates were drawn. No one over there is picking up the phone. Has 205 closed?

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Photo via Bowery Boogie

​We were not the only ones to grumble about the Annex, whose off-brand booking practices and sullen bouncers never quite coalesced into a place in which you might actually want to spend any time. But at least it was a venue, that booked bands on occasion. As opposed to what it is now: The Doghouse Saloon, elegantly summed here by Bowery Boogie:

Proclaiming themselves "drinking consultants," this new frat-hole replacement allegedly has ten TVs, free hot dogs until 4 am, and holds regular beer pong tournaments. And of course, lest we forget, the monthly "Bikini Beach Party."

The logo for the new spot is pretty immortal too:

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Photo via konoa.com

Before 66 Wooster Street became the Ohio Theatre and various apartments, it had a former life as a textile factory. Theatrical legend has it that before the first performance--in what was then called the Open Space--the cast and crew went down on hands and knees, armed with magnets, pulling decades of dropped pins and needles from the floorboard. Many years later, the Ohio is on pins and needles again. The building that houses the Ohio is being sold, and in a few weeks or months the Ohio Theatre will almost certainly cease to exist.

Robert Lyons, artistic director of Soho Think Tank, a nonprofit group that administers the Ohio and produces the OBIE-award winning Ice Factory Festival, describes the situation: "In one way or another, our days are numbered. It's just a matter of what that number is. We're trying to finish the season lined up through June. We could possibly still be here in the summer for Ice Factory '09. It could all end as soon as the end of January." While Lyons is currently in talks with the building's prospective buyer, he dismisses the idea that the Ohio will have any long-term future. "That doesn't seem like it's in the cards," he says. If the new owner allows the current season to finish up, audiences can bid farewell to the Ohio through its remaining scheduled shows, among them Target Margin's 10 Blocks on the Camino Real, Eisa Davis's Angela's Mix Tape (produced by New Georges), and Clubbed Thumb's annual Summer Works festival.

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