The 443 is three years old today… can you believe it?!?
Jimmy and I opened our little venue up on January 17, 2019. Like most new businesses, we struggled mightily that first year, but when we celebrated our one-year anniversary in 2020, we were feeling optimistic for the very first time. We were selling the room out more consistently, bar sales were up and we felt we had finally turned the corner.
We thought we just might make it.
Shortly after our birthday bash, we started hearing rumblings about COVID-19… and, well, you all know what happened next.
We closed our doors on March 15, thinking it might be for a few months.
HA!
We opened up for a couple of weeks in August of 2020, then shut down abruptly when then-Gov. Cuomo banned advertising and charging for live music. We reopened in mid-September at about 40% capacity with heavy restrictions. Thanks to gorgeous, mild, fall weather that allowed us to do most of our shows on the patio, we managed to stay open until November 15. Skyrocketing COVID cases closed our doors again.
I don’t think I even acknowledged our second birthday in 2021 because it was such a strange time. We had been closed for a couple of months and had no idea when or if we might reopen.
As it turned out, it was late July of 2021 before we managed to reopen and there is no way we could have done it without receiving the Shuttered Venue Operator Grant.
We’re incredibly grateful we still have our doors open thanks to the tireless lobbying efforts of NIVA and Sen. Chuck Schumer.
Our loyal customers have kept us going emotionally (we love you guys!), but at the end of the day, it takes cold, hard cash for a business to survive a global pandemic and being closed for 70% (!!!) of the last 2 years. Senator Schumer lobbied relentlessly to secure the Shuttered Venue Operator Grant for independent venues, and this grant allowed us to reopen our doors in the summer of 2021. He also made it possible for us to receive a supplemental SVOG grant in the fall which will allow us to survive this winter and the current COVID resurgence.
It’s sobering how close we came to closing our doors for good and how close Syracuse came to losing one of its few remaining dedicated live music venues. We’re thankful every single day that we’ve been given a chance to keep our dream alive.
We’ve tweaked and changed things constantly over the last three years, and while I can’t say I’m “grateful” for COVID, I can say that it has forced us to make some necessary operational changes that likely would have taken us much longer to get to if we were operating normally.
When we opened, our room featured funky, 1970’s style living rooms. It made sense for our original daytime coffee house concept, but moving everything around for ticketed shows was a huge drag.
After being open for about 6 months, we dropped the coffee house concept and eventually stopped serving lunch too – our neighborhood just wasn’t the right spot for it, plus it was exhausting for our small staff to be open from early morning until midnight with not much return.
When we opened for a few months in the fall of 2020, we put the living room furniture into storage and changed all our seating to tables and chairs. The main reason was to make sure everything was easily sanitized, but if we’re being honest – it was a relief to not have to constantly shove heavy vintage sofas around.
It seemed pretty stark compared to the cozy space we were used to, but it was the right move to make. At this point, we were still supposed to keep tables six feet apart, so it was kind of surreal to be open with just a handful of tables set up cabaret-style.
But, we made it work.
Then, we were closed for another 8 months, which gave us a lot of time to think about what we wanted the business to look like.
When we finally opened back up in July of 2021, things were looking up. COVID cases were down and we were looking forward to rebuilding a business decimated by the pandemic. We required proof of COVID vaccination at the door because we felt it was the right thing to do, and our regular guests were appreciative.
With the six-foot rule no longer in place, we added more tables and chairs both inside and out.
Photo Credit Steve DePra
We reopened to enthusiastic crowds, sold-out shows, and a sense of optimism for the first time in a LONG time. Unfortunately, it was short-lived.
COVID cases started spiking in the late summer and things got weird again. Shows were canceled, then whole tours were canceled, and people started retreating back to their houses… it felt like March 2020 all over again.
At this point, I felt like we had nothing left to lose – and I began making moves that put us on our current path to reimagining the 443.
We canceled our long-running open mic night, mainly because it was a net loss every week. I was paying our staff, the host band, the sound tech, and the door person checking vax cards, but we always seemed to have a lot of folks who came in, played their two songs, and left without buying anything, or sat there all night without making a purchase. We just could not make it work. It was a hard decision, but it was 100% the right one.
We’ve implemented a $15 minimum purchase for all shows, which has put an end to people occupying a seat for 3 hours and ending up with a $2 tab.
As we headed into the holiday season, I stopped trying to fill our calendar because of the rising concern about COVID, Omicron ripping through our community, and a good chunk of the population inexplicably still not vaccinated. By mid-December, we were doing just 1-2 shows each week and January 2022 looks much the same.
But we’ve come to an interesting realization as we fight our way through all this madness – we are doing better with FEWER shows.
It seems counterintuitive, right?
I’m completely over the idea that I have to keep the 443 open on some kind of regular schedule, and I am no longer booking bands just to fill a night. We are not a “bar” in the normal sense, we are a music venue that happens to have a bar in it. We are only open when we have someone gracing our stage. That means we are doing 2-4 shows per week, rather than 5-7 per week. The difference is, now we’re making them all count.
When we opened, I truly thought our community – especially musicians – would support a venue hosting local, ORIGINAL music, but that has just not been the case. We struggle with attendance when bands play at our place with the necessary cover charge while also playing free shows at other venues. It is what it is… but it doesn’t make sense financially for us to keep trying to change the status quo.
On the other hand, touring acts are doing extraordinarily well at the 443, which means I have a lot of new opportunities with booking agents.
We tried doing a stand-up comedy show for the first time, and it went great – so we’ll be adding them to our calendar every now and again.
We parted ways with an artist who absolutely wretched to our staff. The shows were drawing well, but it just wasn’t worth the stress and wear and tear on our team.
We retooled our popular “Tacos & Blancos” Sunday event, and it became “Nachos & Blancos”. We had a tough time managing all the prep for build your own tacos, but after we acquired our pizza ovens, we discovered that nachos were more manageable in our small space. They’re still a fun change from our usual menu and ticket sales for the event are just about back to pre-COVID levels.
I always wanted to run fun and creative workshops on off nights, it was in my game plan for the 443 from the very beginning. But, I just never had the bandwidth to put it together after dealing with the booking, marketing, and ticketing for our music schedule. So, we recently partnered with Right Mind Syracuse, and we’ll be hosting a different workshop each month.
We’ve always had requests to rent our room out for private parties, but our heavy music schedule usually forced us to turn them down. Now, we can easily accommodate private events of all kinds, and it’s a more reliable revenue stream.
Our new floor plan has allowed us to actually fill the room to our legal capacity. We are shattering sales records at the bar. I’ve expanded my ideas about who should play our room, and our audience is loving it. After many, many iterations of our menu, and the purchase of a countertop pizza oven, I think we’ve finally settled on what we can do well with our very limited space.
We are presenting fewer local shows these days and if we don’t have enough reservations for it to make sense, the show is canceled. That may sound harsh, but we just can’t afford the financial hit from letting a band play to 15 people and our staff . So, instead of running 5 shows a week with 2-3 of them COSTING us money, we’re doing 2-3 per week and they are almost all home runs.
I am building a team that treats our guests like family. We regularly receive messages about how amazing our crew is. They work their asses off, and we do our best to make the 443 an awesome place to work. Our staff treats this business like it’s their own and I couldn’t be more grateful.
And best of all, we have cultivated a really lovely, kind, and generous tribe of music lovers and friends.
We’ve created a space where all are welcome, as long as you’re a good human being. If someone isn’t polite to our staff or other guests, we weed them out pretty quickly. Our guests appreciate that we treat them like guests in our own homes and in return, their kindness and generosity are absolutely overwhelming. Guests regularly offer to volunteer or press cash into my hand to help us survive this bat-shit crazy time we are living in, and it makes me weep with gratitude. In all my years in the hospitality business, I’ve never witnessed anything like this.
We have built something very special.
We are lucky to have made it this far, grateful for the folks who have supported us, and we’re committed to fighting our way through this craziness.
Happy birthday to us –
CHEERS!
