At Some Point We’ll Just Have To Close The Bridges And Tunnels At 5pm
Despite my snickering at the demise of this worthless lair of foolishness, it’s not due to any ill will. I’ve simply moved on from the suburban corporate life that would have made a place like this an appealing destination. Yes, I used to be from Jersey, and places like this have big appeal to that sort of crowd. It’s in New York, and there’s a lot of action in it environs, but it wasn’t too snobbish and expensive - nor was it gritty and terrifying. Since I now frequent all the snob/$$$ and dirt/horror places as a resident New Yorker, and since surburban people are now generally exhausting in long doses, people like me simply have no use for places like Culture Club.
But places like these are popular. And very successful. And now in short supply. The rules of economics dictate that demand goes up as supply goes down. I mean, it’s not like Marquee started letting all the Culture Club people in. When you shut down an Avalon or a SoundFactory, or (now) a Culture Club + Nerveana, you tighten the B&T market, putting the squeeze on the patrons and increasing profit for the owners.
Since this has been happening for a while, in no small part due to Guiliani and his reign of terror, you’d think that B&T bars would be running things well enough to beat away bubble investors. Apparently, the bubble has gotten that big such that developers are convinced they can afford to buy out most of the nightclubs in a market of 30 million people (plus 44 million tourists) without so much as blinking. They paid $14 million dollars for a plot of land that requires a delicate expensive teardown (abuts a busy subway and is squeezed among a whole block of buildings), THEN the construction (costs running at all time highs), and this will take years to complete starting from a time when the national real estate market is already softening. The economy is doing well enough and the opportunity cost for sinking $30-$40 million in something other than equity investments is pretty high. So how does the math work on this? Poorly.
This is clearly a greedy and stupid move on behalf of the developers. I only hope that $14 million wasn’t a low price, because that would make the Culture Club owners stupid too.
Your homework: how soon will the new building crumble and fall apart? Obviously, when it comes time to build, they’ll “cut costs” in all the wrong places and cheap materials will be one of them. I’d be afraid to bump into a wall in that place.