Have you had this before? Well you have it again…

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A silver lining?

When I did the Palladium the second time around with my sidekick Kelly Cole, the economy was tanking like General Patton. We were revamping, re-launching, recreating, and reusing the old space - and part of my shtick was to make a big deal about staffing. Kelly and the rest of my crew placed ads in Variety, the Times, the Voice, everywhere; throwing out a large net in attempt to not only have a lot of quality sources, but to let the world know we were reopening. I think we had a 5pm call and by 4pm we had five hundred people on line. By the time we opened the line stretched from mid-block 13th street (the back entrance), up 4th avenue and around to the Palladium marquee on 14th. Thousands of people for two hundred jobs. The New York Times sent a photographer. I think our publicist called them, and the aerial shot made the front page. We decided to try to interview these folks as we needed staff, and they needed jobs. We set up desks on the street level where seven of every ten people interviewed by staff were rejected immediately. The survivors got up to see me and I believe it was Marc Altschuler and a couple of other assistants. We interviewed in groups of twenty, and I was told that we did six hundred people. I’m not sure of the math but there were thousands of people and we managed to handle it without arguments or disrespect. We had MBA's and architects begging for coat check jobs. In the end, a great staff was hired and the club went on to be very successful despite an economy that was real bad.

All day long I’ve been getting calls about what it all means. The consensus is that Tenjune and clubs which cater to the Wall Street crowd will be most affected and that the highest end joints like 1 Oak and Rosebar will not see a difference. I believe Tenjune, Marquee and those "types" of joints will do just fine because of brainpower at the top. These guys will adjust, buckle down, trim fat, and find a way. The theory that bad news will drive them to drink has always rang true. Look for clubs heavily dependent on corporate revenue streams to be hardest hit, but even those will survive. It may be more weddings for the Capitale, Espace kind of spaces, and those might be less extravagant, but the sharp pencils at those places will erase some costs and come out ahead. Those in trouble are the marginal places run by fairly inexperienced operators who came in on the big wave of the model/bottle era and will surely crash into the beach. I expect vacancies with properties flipping into other hands. It may be a great opportunity for a reemergence of the fun fun fun dive clubs of the 80's. Landlords unable to develop properties may again welcome club runners to maintain a revenue stream until people can actually afford to buy condos again, or there are lending institutions that will actually finance them again.

Editor's Note: Yesterday, Steve Lewis was scooped on the new Aspen Social Club which Steve is designing with partner Marc Dizon. As Steve's editor, I find it amusing that people can "scoop" him on his own project which he neglected to introduce to loyal viewers of his blog first. I am extremely curious as to what's going on in his head, and while I've asked him for an explanation he has yet to give me a suitable one. Apparently Steve wears many hats, and he seems to have forgotten about this one. Way to go Mr. Lewis

Good Night,

Mr. Lewis

Written by Steve Lewis.

Edited by Jessica Tocko.

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