Take a walk into The Alley
Brand-new nightclub behind Carnivale features music and good vibes
The clock moving into late evening, conversation at the table was peppered with the past, with the names of nightclubs long gone — Gold Star Sardine Bar, Pepper’s Lounge, Earl of Old Town, Byfield’s and … Anyone remember the Raccoon Club?
“What about Mister Kelly’s?” said one woman.
“The Gate of Horn?” said a man.
“Hey, how about the Burning Spear?” said another.
This conversation was inevitable perhaps because the eight people gathered had just experienced the city’s newest nightclub. It is called “The Alley” and is housed in a small space at the back of the restaurant Carnivale, 702 W. Fulton St., which for nearly two decades has been a vibrant, acclaimed, and huge (35,000 square feet) culinary oasis.
Former Tribune restaurant critic Phil Vettel wrote that this “multilevel pan-Latin restaurant has the look of a hot nightclub and the price tag of a neighborhood eatery,” noting its menu of “Latin influences from South and Central America and the Caribbean … (in a restaurant) the size of a warehouse … the space is broken up into many smaller dining areas (with) design touches — velvet curtains, custom-made metalwork — (that make it) colorful and energetic.”
We now live at a time when restaurants are among the most vulnerable of businesses. Over the last two years there have been many closings and relatively few openings.
It’s been even harder for that breed of diversion called the nightclub, a species with ancient roots, going back to that ebullient early settler Mark Beaubien, who enlivened his Sauganash Hotel with fine fiddle playing and lusty ballads in the 1830s.
I have watched dozens of clubs come and go. It is a perilously competitive business, one that mangles not only a bankroll but the heart. Most of the club owners’ discoveries and experiences are not the stuff of pleasant dreams, yet they have always been out there, trying to carve out for themselves a little piece of nocturnal pie, offering entertainers a place to work and the rest of us a place to play.
Long ago Phil Johnson, one of the owners of a then-new and short-lived club called “Boombala on Lincoln Avenue,” told me, “You don’t just open the doors, book some acts and fight off the crowds. I can’t imagine a tougher business.”
There are a lot of tougher occupations — cops, nurses — but running a nightclub is not an easy
job and Johnson’s feelings were common, echoed through the decades.
So who in their right mind, you might now ask yourself, would open a nightclub?
The answer is Billy Marovitz. He is a man of boundless energies and big ideas. He is the son of the late Sydney Marovitz, who was an attorney, longtime Democratic precinct captain and Park District commissioner, appointed by Richard J. Daley.
He is the nephew of Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, one of the city’s most colorful characters: a lawyer, member of the Illinois State Senate from 1939 until 1950 (its first Jewish member), and then a judge on the state and later federal bench, noted for swearing in new U.S. citizens and elected officials, including both Daleys as mayor.
He is a lawyer and was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1974 to 1980, then a state senator from 1980 to 1993. Then he got into real estate development. He got into the restaurant business. In 1995 he married then-Playboy CEO Christie Hefner, Hugh Hefner’s delightful and bright daughter, and was married to her until 2013, a time during which time he lost money when accused of having used insider stock information.
He’s a big personality, devoted to many charities, and he was among the creators of the musical “Miracle,” which played the Royal George in 2019.
He seems to know everybody, and many of those people filled the 80-some Alley stools and chairs.
They may have known Billy, but few had heard of the night’s headliner, Sonny Luca, a singer/ songwriter. And that’s the way Marovitz wants it.
“I want this to be a place where young and undiscovered talent can shine,” he said. “There are so many performers who just need a chance and I want to give that to them.”
He is exercising what is a new creative freedom, having recently bought out some of his original Carnivale partners, and he and one other person now are the only ones running the place.
And he has other things in the works, such as planning to hold dance contests on weekend nights, opening a Carnivale at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas and perhaps other places, opening a roof deck bar and doing some other remodeling to the existing place.
The Alley is the first of his new ideas to be manifest, carved from an existing area often used to handle overflow crowds of diners when Carnivale is at capacity.
“It is what I think of when I think of a nightclub … Dark, sexy and intimate,” he said. “I was a huge fan of Mister Kelly’s when I was a young man and I have always loved piano bars.”
The first Alley act came to him courtesy of his best friend, the entertainment entrepreneur Arny Granat, who was in the opening-night crowd with his wife, the talented singer Irene Michaels.
“Irene took me to a concert in the Fine Arts building, and that’s where first saw Sonny and I was blown away,” said Granat.
He made a handshake deal to become Luca’s manager and last year organized some concerts featuring his wife, Luca and other performers. These “Our House” shows played such places as the North Side’s Le Piano, Club Arcadia in St. Charles and Davenport’s, the venerable Wicker Park outpost.
“I could tell from those soldout shows that people had a burning need to go out and see and hear music,” Granat said. “That was true tonight, and this was only Sonny’s eighth public show. I would say that I am 100 percent pleased.”
Granat surely knows music, if not on the Alley’s cozy scale. For nearly 50 years he ran Jam Productions with Jerry Mickelson, leaving a couple of years ago to pursue other endeavors.
He was pleased with Luca’s performance at the Alley’s debut and plans to act as a sort of talent scout for Marovitz and the club.
Marovitz is happy with his collaboration with Granat and was pleased by the Alley’s opening.
“I thought it went great,” he said. “People told me they would be coming back.”
An informal survey of that crowd found most people praising the setting and performance, many lauding the selection of craft cocktails such as “Carnivale old fashioned,” mojitos and something called a “caipirinha,” which is Brazil’s national drink, made with sugar, lime and cachaça, a potent liquor.
The show lasted a bit over an hour, with Luca singing and playing, on guitar and piano, some original songs as well as some familiar tunes, distinctive renditions of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Blackbird.”
There was a fine bass player and pianist offering solid accompaniment. Another member of the band was Michael Austin, a successful writer of fiction and nonfiction and once a wine columnist for the Tribune, who was also part of the “Our House” gang. He plays the bodhrán, an Irish traditional drum, and did so in such an artfully dramatic fashion that surely he made new fans.
“From the moment I walked in, before the audience arrived, it just felt good,” he said. “You know how certain rooms have a feel, either from the layout or design or the décor? There’s something pleasing about the room itself. It has lots of energy, yet it’s also calming. Don’t ask me how they pulled that off, but to me it was palpable.
“The most important thing about the club to me, and presumably any performer who follows, was the sound. Sonny brought in a portable sound system, nothing too fancy, and it sounded really good. Other performers will have different sound systems, but the point is something in that room is conducive to good sound. It’s in the bones.
So a comfortable, intimate room with really good sound? Yeah, I’d go back — to play or to listen.”
The next show is planned for May and some of those finishing their dinner at Carnivale said they would return.
A few other names of bygone clubs surfaced, and when one woman said, “How about Acorn of Oak?” I remembered many nights there and something I was told by the late piano master Buddy Charles, one of the most ebullient and talented performers in the city’s long late-night history:
“There is something primitive about being close to live music. What makes it work is that people are inherently eager for intimacy.”