The Lantern will be on East Avenue, in Rochester's East End, in a building from the 1920s that has held a bar before. The suite is on a corner, so it has two street frontages and shares a wall with a neighbour on one side only. It is a little under 3,500 square feet on the ground floor, with an office mezzanine above part of it. The lease is not signed yet, so the address is not published here. It will be when it is.
What the room has to be able to do
The concept has always had a short list of physical requirements, and the room was chosen against them.
- A stage out of the sightline from the street. In the daytime the room is a place to work, and nobody wants to sit facing an empty stage. In the evening the stage has to be where the people who want to watch can, and the people who want to talk can keep talking. The mezzanine and the depth of the suite give that.
- Seating for about 120, in loose cabaret rows for a show and at tables the rest of the time. The daytime and the evening use the same chairs.
- Power at every seat and wifi that works. These are not amenities. They are the reason someone stays four hours instead of forty minutes.
- A room that already worked as a bar. The bar, the prep area and the plumbing for a licensed premises are far cheaper to keep than to build. It also means the address has held a liquor licence before, which matters for how quickly a new one can be granted.
- Parking. The building has its own garage with more than fifty spaces. That is unusual for the corridor and it removes the first objection anyone raises about going out in the East End.
- Sound. A single party wall and masonry construction make it easier to keep amplified music inside the room and away from the neighbours, which is the condition on which a music venue keeps its licence.
What it will not have
There is no full commercial kitchen, and there will not be a dinner menu. The Lantern serves light fare from a small prep kitchen: sandwiches, simple soups, pastries and small plates. It is there so that someone can stay through the evening without leaving to eat, not to compete with the restaurants on the block. A small kitchen keeps the build-out and the payroll small, and it keeps the room quiet enough to work in.
Why the East End
The East End is the part of Rochester that already goes out at night. Within walking distance there are more than ten thousand downtown residents, the Eastman School, the hospital and university populations to the south, and a corridor of bars, restaurants and venues that people already travel to. What the corridor does not have is somewhere to sit and work at two in the afternoon that turns into somewhere to hear a band at nine. That is the gap this room is meant to fill.
Hours
Eleven in the morning to midnight, Monday to Saturday, and eleven to eight on Sunday, all year. The music ends around eleven on show nights, and the doors close at midnight rather than two, on purpose. A midnight close is easier to licence with apartments nearby, easier to insure, and easier to staff, and hours can be extended later once there is a reason to.
Next: Hours and programming