The entirety of this music issue is a small exercise in remembering. For nostalgia’s sake surely, but also as a reminder that the idea of permanence truly is a pipe dream. The songs we enjoy, the rooms we experience them in and even the people we move through that world with; each and every one of those things has an expiration date. We don’t always know exactly how close the end really is, but look at all the shuttered spaces on the previous pages — truth is that the mutation of our live music experience seems to be the only sure thing after all.
That stupid, barefaced fact of life still doesn’t make change any easier. Especially in the case of New World Brewery, which is likely going to relocate sooner than later. The current site of the 22-year-old Ybor City institution is part of a $63.5 million investment made by BluePearl CEO Darryl Shaw and several different partners, who’ve scooped up at least 110 parcels in and around the historic district. Ariel Quintela, Shaw’s fellow property owner at 1313 E. 8th Ave., told CL in December that he expects to have “something started on the site” by Thanksgiving.
There’s no clear bad guy in the complicated equation that is urbanization, but it’s hard not to feel painfully blue about the demolition of New World and the prospect of its being replaced by a mixed-use development featuring three floors of apartments above office, retail or restaurant space (live/work/play, y’all). Sure, the adjacent historic firehouse will be restored as part of the deal — and New World owner Steve Bird has promised to rebuild at a site to be announced — but it’s hard to overstate what the award-winning restaurant, pub and concert venue has meant to Tampa Bay’s hard-working musicians, their fans and the good-hearted degenerates who’ve made countless memories and many fast, sometimes everlasting, friends on that famous wooden patio.
Playing at New World — where bartenders usually love the bands’ music as much as the fact that it brings people in the door — is a rite of passage for locals; the Ybor oasis has hosted tens of thousands of homegrown sets over the years. Countless more national acts, both breaking and well-established, have played some of their best shows beneath the canopy of the bar’s tropical foliage. Hell, even on a slow night, a traveling band low on cash can at least leave New World with a belly full of free pizza and beer. What’s more, a quintessentially local subculture embracing many walks of life is baked into every square inch of the suds-centric sanctuary.
Late last year, Bird acknowledged the special nature of what his staff has built, along with concert promoters and Bay area artists, on a site that was once little more than pea gravel and chainlink fence. He also doesn’t expect Shaw to “value it as we do,” adding that “we’re small in term of [his] long-term vision.”
And Bird is right.
The visions of the community that built itself around New World probably aren’t always things that a few well-to-do, undoubtedly well-intentioned, developers can necessarily observe or feel as they take action on a plan to reinvent one of the oldest, most alluring neighborhoods in America. To have a chance at understanding a place like New World, a developer might’ve had to have one of his early bands play a show there. She might’ve had to give up her already skinny cut of the door charge so that a group that traveled from miles away could put gas in their own van. Said developers might’ve even had to have grown up at New World and then watched another generation of concertgoers, artists, activists and dilly-dalliers start to come of age there, too.
Or maybe you don’t have to do that at all. Perhaps the formula for grasping what’s special about New World Brewery goes like this: show up, grab a drink and stand in front of a band playing its songs while a Florida night breeze blows through the air. All you’d have left to do is understand that simple moments like those give meaning to a lot of people’s lives. You could then recognize that exact moments like those have happened hundreds of thousands of times over the last two decades at New World, and that they continue to happen over and again at independent, locally owned, operated and loved venues across the Bay area.
There’s no doubt that we — the music-loving, tax-paying citizens of Tampa Bay — will follow venues, especially ones like New World, wherever they may go. There’s also no reason that that the permit-approving people we appoint to represent our neighborhoods’ best interests shouldn’t start thinking of more creative ways to keep the musical places we love from moving around so much. The allure and possibilities of a crane in the sky — and the tax revenue that comes with a dense population — can’t possibly trump the charm of every storied venue we grow to love… right?
Change is inevitable, and it’s certainly hard, but someone’s always going to be out there writing a new song for us to sing. The only question is how many times can we keep trying to rewrite a new history until we just stop singing altogether?
This article appears in Jul 13-20, 2017.