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The Depot


capitalapts

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Hi - 5's Sports bar/dance club dual personality makes *more* sense to me than the Depot's Hurricane/Soho East setup. For the east coast, there is little to no interesting sports on TV after midnight EST, which happens to be right when dance clubs start hopping.

Having two distinct spaces leaves the other one mostly empty.

The fact that Soho east was the worse than the Five O or Comet were on their worst days didn't help matters either. The space, the song selection, etc. were not good. They didn't have any comment cards probably because they didn't want to hear firsthand how bad they were. *If* they had taken the time to listen to customers and make a few adjustments, they could have done ok. But that didn't happen.

I don't know how much the depot-as-office-space would get vs. retail/restaurant/club, but it if is close, NCRR should do it. That would let them use the parking spaces for the office tenants by day and work out a deal with The Pit, Sin City or whoever else at night/on the weekends.

Moving the Berkley Cafe to the ess space could be good -- sandwiches by day, low-key bar at night. But it might be too far of a walk for office workers on F Street. There isn't enough lunch goers in the area right now, but the city's offices are still there, Campbell Law and the L won't be too far away.

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Hi - 5's Sports bar/dance club dual personality makes *more* sense to me than the Depot's Hurricane/Soho East setup. For the east coast, there is little to no interesting sports on TV after midnight EST, which happens to be right when dance clubs start hopping.

Having two distinct spaces leaves the other one mostly empty.

The fact that Soho east was the worse than the Five O or Comet were on their worst days didn't help matters either. The space, the song selection, etc. were not good. They didn't have any comment cards probably because they didn't want to hear firsthand how bad they were. *If* they had taken the time to listen to customers and make a few adjustments, they could have done ok. But that didn't happen.

I don't know how much the depot-as-office-space would get vs. retail/restaurant/club, but it if is close, NCRR should do it. That would let them use the parking spaces for the office tenants by day and work out a deal with The Pit, Sin City or whoever else at night/on the weekends.

Moving the Berkley Cafe to the ess space could be good -- sandwiches by day, low-key bar at night. But it might be too far of a walk for office workers on F Street. There isn't enough lunch goers in the area right now, but the city's offices are still there, Campbell Law and the L won't be too far away.

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  • 4 months later...

I wanted to bump this thread just to see if anyone had any news of possible tenants for the depot. I went to The Pit last night (which was great btw), and remembered that it has been about four months since the 'Depot 3 Fiasco'.

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NCRR must be asking some outrageous rent or offering bad lease terms...what a waste of a nice renovation job. On the other hand, I remember City Market when it was first renovated sitting half vacant for YEARS (yeah, its current half vacant state is, in fact, a form of deja vu...)

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I just ate lunch at Brass Grill and talked to the owner for a while. He has some insider knowledge of course on other restaurants and said several of teh new big places are around 25 bucks a square foot. (thats per year). In the case of Fins he said that translates into 8000 a month rent. He also said the price of materials to upfit space for even the tiniest place is 300k with a normal sized restaurant being a million and a place like Mint being 3 million. So.....The Depot......knowing how the NCRR is when it comes to their property (easements especially) I can see potential problems arising. Also too the Brass Grill owner said that there are simply too many restaurants opening and relatively few new residents and office workers. The egg needs the chicken for sure. The Depot is a well done building but maybe needs to rethink its place as a night spot and say, try to recruit an office tenant (nice parking lot), or even combine the spaces as a grocery store at some point....dunno exactly...this corner, central as it is, is also isolated by dead-end roads/RR tracks and the run down neighborhood to the south.

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