Departing Metropol leaves Strip in need of a new icon

Before 1988, what was nightlife in the Strip District• Tossing back a boilermaker before loading produce trucks on the graveyard shift?

Perhaps. But Metropol changed things.

The cavernous dance club opened that year. A decade later, the Strip had grown so dense with nightclubs that the streets practically ran pink and green with daiquiris and margaritas.

The Metropol, which will close its doors a final time after its New Year's Eve sendoff, leaves a bustling nighttime neighborhood where once little more than the first Primanti Brothers sandwich counter stayed open after dark.

And like every other Strip District nightclub to come and go in the past 10 years, a new dance floor will take Metropol's place. Physically, at least.

The sale of the dance club, which shares 24,000 square feet with the slightly younger music showcase Rosebud next door, is almost final. Robin Fernandez, one of the club's founding partners, will continue to operate his popular Downtown tapas bar, Bossa Nova. Rosebud, under new ownership, will stay open for live bands.

Fernandez, who at press time hadn't returned several phone calls requesting an interview, broke the mold with Metropol, a place Pittsburghers weren't accustomed to seeing in their hometown, especially among the Strip's food wholesalers and aging warehouses.

Opening night at the club in 1988 was the dawn of a new era in the city for Mark Snyder, now a stylist at Salon Nuvo, Downtown.

"They were playing thumping techno music. I had never heard it," he says. "We went and drank ourselves crooked."

He went almost weekly for several years.

"All the really cool people went there. All the Eurotrash, the people starting their own companies, MBAs just out of college, a lot of gay people. Beautiful people, drunk out of their minds, packing the dance floor, just dancing, dancing. It was really decadent and beautiful. It made you want to be bad. And that was new for Pittsburgh."

Also new for Pittsburgh was the club's design.

"The thing that set it apart was that it was designed from the ground up as a club with a particular point of view — you know, the industrial look," says Felix Fukui, the architect who recently designed Sanctuary, a new Strip District club on Liberty Avenue, operated by a former Fernandez employee. "It was about Pittsburgh — it was coming out of the past as a steel town."

Naked I-beams run from floor to ceiling. Some walls have steel plating. Walkways and balcony bars around the edges of the room let partiers survey the floor like a foreman.

Leigh Hampton, co-executive producer of the show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," recalls visiting the Strip in Metropol's first year.

"That's when it was seedy," says Hampton, a former Carnegie Mellon University student who visited the neighborhood for two reasons — Metropol and Primanti Brothers. "(The club) was in the middle of food deliveries coming in."

Although the Strip at night isn't as crowded today as it was in the late 1990s, the neighborhood is dense with nightspots for the 10 blocks along Smallman Street, Penn Avenue, Liberty Avenue and part of the Allegheny River.

Most look like mini-Metropols, siphoning off the original club's business. The crowds are mostly college-age, and cheap beer and Top 40 dance music rule supreme.

"I think Robin did a wonderful job starting (Strip nightlife)," says Becky Rodgers, executive director of the merchant organization Neighbors in the Strip, which was organized in 1999.

And in the center of it all — the 1600 block of Smallman — Metropol and Rosebud have stood, emptying slowly. The Strip needs a new icon.

The closing of Metropol is endemic of the Strip District's current dilemma: The nighttime crowds just aren't what they used to be.

Gigantic chain dance clubs such as Banana Joe's and BAR Pittsburgh folded, and smaller clubs nearby have met the same fate. The new clubs popping up in their places don't look much different.

Although the crime rate has dropped in the neighborhood, two late-night shootings in the past two years on Smallman Street and outside the Boardwalk aren't helping to entice new visitors.

Nightlife entrepreneurs from out of town are balking at setting up shop there, says Terri Sokoloff, the real-estate broker who found buyers for Metropol and Rosebud. She specializes in restaurants and bars.

"They see the Strip District is changing," she says. "We don't know in which direction it's changing."

Strip nightlife needs a new Metropol to change the landscape.

And that's the plan, according to the group that's buying Metropol and Rosebud. They want to keep out the riffraff.

"When we bring in (business) clients, it's kind of embarrassing," says Tommy Wang, an Internet and real-estate entrepreneur and one of the heir apparents to the venue. "We have to drive to Toronto (for good nightlife)."

Wang, 28, and his brother Henry, 26, are Carnegie Mellon University grads who grew up in DuBois. They started and owned the Pittsburgh dot-com business incubator iventurelab.com until they sold it earlier this year. Their partner in the nightclub venture is Ryan Blumling, 23.

"In the last five months, we looked at over 100 places" with ideas coming in from high-end clubs as far away as Shanghai and Tai Pei, where relatives of the brothers operate luxury lounges, Tommy Wang says.

"And Vegas. We go there quite often," he says. "The customer service is excellent there."

The space Metropol occupied will close on New Year's Day and change entirely, the brothers say. Rosebud will remain a performance venue, with technology upgrades.

"We want people who will pay for quality," says Henry Wang. "We will limit the people who come in here. We don't want to pack in so many people that they're banging into each other."

His brother adds, "We will sacrifice profits to do that."