NORTHAMPTON — A new downtown performance venue aiming to fill a gap in the city’s nightlife could open soon, bringing live music, theater, drag shows and other kinds of entertainment to Pleasant Street.
The space, which is called Blackbird, will replace what was formerly Wurst Haus at 27 Pleasant St., between Downtown Sounds and Northampton Wools.
Owner Lauryn Winiarski said they hope to have the space open seven days a week and start most shows at 8 or 9 p.m. They’ll be allowed to have a capacity of up to 250 people, though they’ll probably cap it a bit lower than that to give guests breathing room.
Winiarski, a licensed contractor with about a decade of bartending experience, has been renovating the space over the past seven months. The work is self-funded, with help from a small business loan from TD Bank.
The first floor will have a modular stage, a bar, a lobby with seating, a green room, a bathroom, and a line of stanchions to the back. Its basement will feature four more toilet stalls in two separate bathrooms, plus two extra rooms that will be off-limits to guests. The drink menu will include beer, wine and mocktails.
Blackbird still needs approval on a few inspections before the venue can open, which “could be as soon as a couple days pass or another couple weeks,” Winiarski said. “So I haven’t booked anybody yet, because I don’t want to have to say, ‘Sorry, we’re not ready to open yet.’”
Besides being a contractor and a bartender, Winiarski is also a law student at Western New England University. They studied entrepreneurship at Holyoke Community College, and they’re a mechanical engineer, too — getting a master’s degree in innovation and management at Tufts University is what gave them the confidence to open a venue, they said.
Besides that, Winiarski saw a need for a new community performance space in the absence of venues like Pearl Street Night Club, Divas, and the Calvin Theater, among others. As a trans nonbinary person, Winiarski said that the current administration has made things “pretty scary, but I think that an important part of this is me putting my face forward and saying, ‘Yep, that’s right, a trans person is owning a business, and you’re welcome here.’ I keep forgetting to put a rainbow flag up because I’m like, ‘Isn’t it obvious?’” they laughed.
“We need places for queer people to be able to gather and feel comfortable and safe. We need places for young people and college students to be able to gather and feel safe,” they added.
Though Winiarski grew up in Springfield, they’ve lived in Northampton for almost a decade, and they’ve been chatting with a few other local business owners to discuss ideas for bar crawls involving their venues.
“Not one of our clubs can fit all of the people that are out on a Saturday night that want to be out, and that used to be the fun thing about Northampton — you just parked somewhere and you just went. You could go to five different places and you’d try to get to one band before 1 a.m. We’re hoping to bring that back,” they said.
Winiarski chose the name “Blackbird” because they wanted something that was unique but also easy to Google. They got the idea while listening to music with their mom one day, when the song “Blackbird,” which George Harrison reportedly wrote to honor Black women in the Civil Rights Movement, played on shuffle.
“I figure it’s kind of symbolic of me using my privilege as a white person of means to give people of color, Indigenous people, and people from marginalized communities the opportunity to perform when they might not necessarily get that,” they said. “We know how much of a fight it can be.”
Winiarski also designed the space with accessibility in mind — in fact, they’re a part-time wheelchair user themself. The bar includes a section at a lower height, for wheelchair users and people of short stature; an accessible restroom on the ground floor; chairs without arms, for plus-size guests; an accessible green room, whose former step entrance has been replaced with a ramp; and an aluminum ramp that will attach to the stage. They also plan to fix the entrance to the venue as well, once they have the funding to do so.
Winiarski is currently looking for bartenders and security staff. Artists of all kinds are encouraged to reach out as well; visual artists will be able to display their work for sale for up to $200 per piece, and Winiarski will take a 10% commission.
Though they want the space to welcome a variety of acts, they do have one stipulation: “I can’t do amplified drums. That’s off my lease, because we don’t want to shake the building, so no microphones on drums — not that you need it in this gorgeous brick room,” they said.
Blackbird’s sound system, which was custom-built for the venue, has a decibel limiter to keep too much noise from spilling into the apartments above it.
Still, Winiarski already accounted for potential noise spillover. “I’ve insulated against it, literally,” they said.
“The ceiling is already set up to refract a lot back, and I found a couple of holes and patched them, and we did pink noise sound testing — like, blasting airplane noise in here and going upstairs and putting our ears to the floor,” they said, “and it’s pretty good. It really holds the sound in well.”
Winiarski also said they want to offer shows without intermissions. “As in, when the band goes off for a break, I’m going to bring up a drag performer. I have magicians I have [business] cards for; I have clowns. There are all kinds of people who can do that sort of thing.”
The added bonus of filling an intermission with another performer, they said, is that guests don’t have the opportunity to “wander outside and then decide you’re going to go home for the evening.”
Even so, the new venue will still have a place in the city’s cultural scene.
“I have been to some of the dingiest warehouse shows where you have to crawl through a cement window that they’ve opened. But if you give people a place to gather and you make them feel safe and comfortable there, they will enjoy themselves and they will create community,” Winiarski said. “They will feel like a part of their community, and they will want to give more to that community, and so that’s what I hope to foster and bring to the area.”
