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I knew -- I knew -- that there was something bad coming today. And here it is:

Little Brother's in Columbus To Close This Summer

Here's an e-mail from Dan Dougan, owner of Little Brother's..

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To friends, family, fans, musicians and community,

There are rumors flying that Little Brother's is being "taken over" or replaced by new ownership, so I thought it was important to clarify our current situation.

Just as we are hitting Little Brother's ten-year anniversary in the Short North this May, I have apparently reached an impasse with the landlord of the building, who has informed me, through his lawyers, that the only new lease he will offer me includes, among other stipulations, an immediate increase in rent of over 40 percent, and annual increases. It has been clearly implied that someone else has offered this amount for the space and that I could be asked to vacate the premises before summer begins.

This came as a surprise, because I had negotiated terms face-to-face with my landlord earlier this year and we verbally agreed upon incremental increases over the next five years that would have been difficult, but not impossible, for us to accommodate over that time. He promised to send the new terms of the lease in writing. Soon after, he stopped responding to my calls and recently began communicating with me only via his attorney.

While business has been good this year, this increase is more than I can afford. The entertainment business goes through so many highs and lows, an agreement of this nature could crush us the next time we hit a slow period. Clearly, if I am asked to leave by summertime, that gives me little time to relocate the club, which is not something I am sure I can endure again anyway.

Read the rest here.

To say that the (potential?) loss of Little Brothers would be a major heartbreak is a bit of an understatement, and I'm not even one of the REALLY COMMITTED Lil' Bros regulars. Yes, there are other places to hear/see bands, bigger and roomier and more modern than Little Brothers, but none with the same kind of scrappy, independent draw. The Newport is still the scuzzy hole it always was, but it's Promowest's scuzzy hole. Little Brothers is its own entity, feisty and dirty and hipper-than-thou, true, but also intimate and unique in its raw, sit-in-the-performers'-laps setup that puts both national acts and your next-door neighbor's band on the same level playing field.

I hope that this is just a little bit of doom and gloom before the situation is happily resolved, but somehow I doubt it. The Short North is, for lack of a better word, gentrifying (as if it wasn't there already!) and it's hardly surprising that a landlord, upon seeing the great speed of development and vast rent increases that have been going on down there for the last three or four years, wouldn't want a little piece of that. If a concert hall that doesn't even operate as a proper bar most days of the week won't pony up the rent, the thinking probably goes, then there's bound to be some latte-bar entrepreneur with dreams of IPOing who'll gladly sign up, until the money inevitably runs out there, too.

Losing Little Brothers would leave Skully's as the last "real" concert venue in the Short North (yes, there are several other bars for performances, but only Skully's and Little Brothers are really equipped/capable of booking the bigger acts, yes?) Why is Skully's, which moved down there from campus much later than Little Brothers, not having the same problems? Too far north? Different economic arrangements above Third Avenue? Who knows?

But it's still a damned shame.

Labels: columbus, little brothers, music, short north

posted by Gus at 12:50 PM | |