The Listening Room at 443 began with the need for an event space.
In 2014 my production company Red Shoes Black Bag launched a project called the Listening Room Acoustic Music Series. The shows were held in the back room of the (now closed) Small Plates restaurant in Armory Square, with rows of chairs set up to hold 110-120 people. The concept was an intimate evening with a singer-songwriter where the focus was on appreciating the artist without competing with TVs, Quick Draw, and a lot of bar chatter. Philly-based singer Jeffrey Gaines was one of our first acts and the show sold out. The lights were down, we had candles lit and the audience was spellbound by Jeffrey’s performance.
I thought, man … THIS is what it’s about!
My business partner Joanna and I loved the series – there was something truly magical about the shows. But, the finances were tough and it was difficult to break even. We both had full-time jobs so we didn’t necessarily have to make money, but we didn’t want to come out of pocket either. The restaurant didn’t charge us a fee for the room, but they kept 100% of the food and bar sales. The tickets sales had to cover the artist fee, sound, and advertising. Not surprisingly, we usually lost money, so we pulled the plug after one season.
We were doing larger shows in a 650 seat theater that were doing well, but we realized that in order to make these smaller acoustic shows viable, we had to keep the bar revenue. Over the next few years, we talked about getting our own space and what that might look like, but we never got too serious about it.
My other partner (in life) Jimmy and his family own a building on Burnet Ave on the edge of the Hawley-Green neighborhood. The three-story structure had a commercial space on the ground floor and two apartments above. His brother Mike lived in one of them and acted as manager of the property. At the time there was a woman using the space for storage with the intention of opening up a furniture consignment store. She never ended up opening the shop and she left when her lease was up, abandoning most of her stuff. The room sat vacant for several months and Mike would mention every now and again that he wasn’t having any luck finding a good tenant.
I had never seen the inside until one day we were dropping something off in the early spring of 2017 and Mike happened to be downstairs working in the room.
It was in very rough shape…aside from being packed with a super-random assortment of weird old furniture, the ceiling needed patching and painting and the bathrooms looked like a gas station in a third world country. It was dusty, dirty and screaming for some TLC.
On top of that, the building is directly across the street from the old train station.
This massive, block-long structure looks like a giant abandoned crack house. The facade is choked with unruly weeds and features boarded up windows and a layer of trash and broken glass on the ground. A flock of angry pigeons hangs out in the weed filled gutters. It’s not actually empty, it’s currently being used as storage for some contractors. Right now, the city is duking it out with special interest groups on the fate of I-81 which sits just on the other side. I think once that is settled someone will develop it, but in the meantime – this is the highly underwhelming view from across the street.
Of course, I immediately decided it would make a perfect spot for our new business.
I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I have always been able to see the potential in almost any space and this room was no exception.
The idea was to run the room strictly as an event space with a handful of ticketed acoustic shows a month. We were also having a lot of conversations about the Indivisible movement and what was happening with our government. The Woman’s March had just happened (we participated in the local one) and as devout feminists, we wanted to get involved somehow and help the cause. We thought we might host roundtable discussions and fundraisers in the space. Either way, we both planned to keep our day jobs. Mike liked the idea because it was a low impact on the building and other tenants, plus it had a nice “cool factor”.
We made a handshake deal and immediately dove into cleaning, painting and repairing our brand new event space – The Listening Room at 443.
