Club Streetscape Responsibility?
5 11 2008Do clubs/music venues have a responsibility to have a nice street scape during the day? It’s a question many communities struggle with throughout the area and one that draws stark opinions on both sides. Places like the Black Cat and the 9:30 Club bring thousands of people to take in shows at night, but during the day are completely closed.
Clearly these venues serve a great purpose of bringing live performances into the city and they also add to the nightlife and street traffic in the evenings. However during the day they can be viewed as block killers, no different than the huge condo and office buildings that have no street retail which are generally panned.
Logistically these type of venues don’t have windows that can engage the street and in urban areas space is precious so storefronts in some cases aren’t an option. Should more attention be paid to the street-scape during the day on future and current venues? Or do the pros outweigh the cons? What do you think?
[Photos: MV Jantzen]
This is a great question. The same people who jump all over any new development that doesn’t have storefronts or some type of nice streetscape, are the first to say how great all these music venues are, it seems hypocritical.
You could say the same thing about restaurants that are only open for dinner or about churches that closed a great deal of the time. There’s also an argument that stores don’t add anything to a neighborhood after they close in the evening, which is when most clubs/music venues are opening. It’s important to have a mix of uses in an area that keep the street active rather than only looking at how a building contributes during a certain time of day.
Yeah but most restaurants and churches have nice streetscapes and are not closed off completely like the venues pictured, and other like them, the blocks that these are on are ugly looking, they could do more to make the streets they are on look nicer and not just board things up whenever they are closed.
You can only have clubs in semi-industrial zoned areas anyway, because of noise issues. These areas are wastelands to begin with. Now that they’ve attracted yuppies who want more retail, they start bashing the clubs because they’re not selling gourmet dog biscuits during the day. Whatever. And that goes double for dumps who don’t serve lunch, or a decent sitdown breakfast even. Yuppies are too busy drinking their burnt-ass coffee and croissanwich to actually sit down to a decent plate of scrapple and grits.
are there any clubs that built their own buildings in dc?
Clubs? The Park (at McPherson square) comes to mind, the entire building was made for the club, but most clubs just build out spaces that were once something else.