Happy Anniversary City Hall Pub!

[fieldafm]

I want to come in one night this week to bask in your year of good fortunes!  

Via today's Times Union

http://jacksonville.com/business/2010-08-16/story/city-hall-pub-making-it-work-where-others-have-failed

City Hall pub making it work where others have failed
By Roger Bull
It seems like a natural. The restaurant and bar is right next door to Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena and its 100 or so events a year, some drawing more than 10,000.

Right across the street is the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville where the Jacksonville Suns average 4,000 fans at each of their 72 home games.

And just a couple of blocks away, there's the stadium where the Jaguars bring another 50,000 people to the area 10 times a year. (With promises of far more people this year, of course.)

But even though it's a long, long walk to another restaurant/bar, successful business has not come easily to the brick building in that spot. And previous owners point to a dearth of customers when there wasn't a big event going on, along with a dearth of parking whether something was going on or not.

City Hall Pub is celebrating its first anniversary this week, but it's the fourth business there in the past four years.

Amsterdam Sky Cafe came first, and it went three years later. The Gas Knob Pub didn't last a year. Jacksonville Sports Pub was meant to be temporary until the owner found a new tenant, which is the current City Hall Pub.

Manager Scott James said that business is doing so well on some nights that they've started renovating the second floor.

"Saturday nights," he said, "we might have 500-600 people here. The bar is full, both patios are full. Man, we're packed."

"The other places that failed here," he said, "depended too much on the arena, the Suns. We make sure we have something to bring them here."

The building, which dates back to 1912, held offices until 2001 when a group started planning and applied for permits to turn it into a restaurant. The new arena and ballpark weren't even there yet, and the city wanted the property for its complex.

But the building's owners held on and in 2003, Amsterdam Sky Cafe opened. But by early 2005, the place was up for sale for $5.5 million.

"Of course it's solid, " co-owner Mark Jackson told the Times-Union at the time. "I know what it's worth."
It didn't sell, and in 2006, Malcolm Marvin bought the mortgage from a bank in Brunswick, Ga. He'd owned several restaurants and bars in Jacksonville Beach, including First Street Grille and The Homestead.

But he'd just gotten out of those businesses and bought the Amsterdam Sky mortgage to flip. After all, the restaurant was still open. He wouldn't say how much he paid for the mortgage, only that he has a total of $1.7 million in it now.

"But then Jackson closed it, and he went bankrupt on me," Marvin said. "It took me 14 months to get the building back. I couldn't even get in there."

By 2008, Marvin had a tenant in Gas Knob Pub, which opened in May.

Ralph Tiernan, one of the partners in Gas Knob, said they'd done their research.

"We saw 70,000 leaving a football game, 15,000 coming out of the arena. But I'd watch them just walk by.

"Then I finally got into their heads. They'd spent a lot of money on tickets for Kenny Chesney, they'd bought several drinks at the concert. They didn't want to spend more money and continue to drink and then drive home.

"And it was really dead when there weren't events unless I created my own. I had bands, I had car shows," said Tiernan, who co-owns Fly's Tie Irish Pub in Atlantic Beach.

As far as food, Tiernan said he'd figured that lunch would be the big draw, and he was right for a while.

"We'd started to build a business, and by the third month we were turning a profit. Dinner was just gravy.

"But then just like that, I can't remember if the was when the problems in Detroit hit or AIG, but lunch just disappeared."

And then there was parking. A parking garage partly owned by the city and managed by Republic Parking sits next door to the pub, but that was open only during special events, and then at a cost - usually $10.

"I did get a deal with the garage to open it for us when nothing else was going on, but then they didn't want to stay to close it up."

And Tiernan said the police would put no-parking bags on the meters the Friday before a Sunday Jaguars game, effectively eliminating all parking in the area for the entire weekend.

Finally, expenses - more than $10,000 a month in rent - took their tolls.

"We just didn't have deep enough pockets to keep it going," he said. "We were figuring six months would be enough. I don't know what I was thinking."

Gas Knob closed after the Florida-Georgia game, a little more than six months after it opened.

So Marvin opened Jacksonville Sports Pub there, but only on Thursday-Saturday and only when there was an event going on.

"We were doing all right," he said. "It was helping to pay the mortgage. But parking was always an issue. You'd think the city would want to bend over backwards to keep someone in that place.

He said he never intended to try to make it work long term.

So in came Ron Sholes with the City Hall Pub, and he brought James home from Tallahassee to run it. And James said the pub started making money after three or four months.

They've worked out a deal with Republic to use the parking garage on nights where there weren't any events going on. The pub pays for each level that fills and they lock it up themselves afterward.

James said they hold pre-game and pre-concert parties.
But the biggest nights, he said, are when there are no events in the arena or ballpark. That's when they hold Wine Down Wednesday, where women get free wine. Or there's deejays or bands, sometimes more than one of each.

"There's no foot traffic down here," James said. "We had to develop events to force people to come. And the people who are coming to concerts have already spent $80, $100.

"The people coming to see us haven't spent anything yet."

Lunch is still slow. A good day might bring 30 or 40 people. And they want to focus more on happy hour, keeping the downtown workers around rather than driving off home.
Now James and Sholes are starting to renovate the second floor of the building, something that Amsterdam Sky's owners talked about doing eight years ago.

"It's going to be a club, something a little nicer," James said.

Meanwhile, out at Fly's Tie, Tiernan still looks back at his year with the Gas Knob with a bit of regret.

"We did the best we could," he said. "But it's hard to have a neighborhood pub mentality when there is no neighborhood."

[vicupstate]

A parking garage partly owned by the city and managed by Republic Parking sits next door to the pub, but that was open only during special events

This is what happens when the city guarantees an 8% profit for the principals of Republic.  What incentive does Republic have to earn maximum revenue when the city will simply cover the difference-guaranteed. 

So much for running the city like a business. 

Congrats to City Hall Pub for making it work.

[tufsu1]

I think this also makes clear that there is a need for the parking garages in that area...obviously, free street spaces at night wasn't enough.

[tufsu1]

ok wait a minute...I'm confused...

1. the area was thriving back when everyone didn't own a car and they didn't "rule our society".

2. aren't you the same person who continully states that we need to remove all meters in downtown and give Toney Sleiman $3+ million to buy a lot...all to make parking easier?

I'm having trouble understanding your love-hate relationship with the automobile...please explain

[tufsu1]

Anyways enough of the ideas behind it, which you will simply misunderstand and then  try and come up with some clever retort involving a guy you talked to once after going to the movie, a vocabulary word from public engineering, and an implausible timeline for the imagined success of a pet grooming venture (or some equally quixotic enterprise) before switching the subject and claiming that you were originally defending the use of automobiles in a medical emergency.

clever ideas/notions...but huh?