Ivy Room is in a ‘good place’ after a tough year
ALBANY >> The owners of the Ivy Room on San Pablo Avenue are in a good place for now after a trying year that saw the popular neighborhood bar and music venue on the brink of closing permanently during the prolonged COVID-19 emergency.
“Right now we’re currently closed,” said coowner Lani Torres. “We decided to hibernate for the winter because we were losing money, so we currently have no shows. We’ve just been trying to pay hard costs.”
Co-owner Summer Gerbing added, “With the colder weather, we thought it was in our best interest to close and hibernate until we get to the other side. Things are not looking bad until early summer.”
Fundraisers, merchandise sales, online benefit shows, cocktails to-go and the like showed the support the small venue enjoyed in a community that extends well beyond Albany and helped the business to cover its expense through the spring and summer.
But it was a grant from a fund created by the folks behind the San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival that saw the Ivy Room through the end of the year and into 2021.
“Actually, we were literally within a month of closing if we hadn’t got the grant,” Torres said.
The $1 million fund, A Bridge for Music Venues, was open to live music places in six Bay Area counties, and the Ivy Room was one of 15 recipients selected.
“It was a rigorous process. We wrote a 33-page applic ation,” sa id co - owner Gerbing. “We’re really grateful to be chosen to get a grant.”
Gerbing and Torres are both experienced at running bars, and that’s what they set out to do in 2015, when they joined forces and resources and bought the Ivy Room, an Albany fixture dating back to the 1940s, in 2015.
The goal was creating an inclusive and welcoming place for people of all backgrounds.
“We wanted to open the doors to everybody, including the people we hire, which is hard for a small room,” Torres said.
“The most important part of hiring staff is being all-inclusive,” Gerbing said. “That’s really important to us.”
Patronage, like the music and staff, includes a wide array of people, backgrounds and ages, and the Ivy Room prides itself on being “a special home for the LGBTQ+ community.”
Then as now, the co-owners have outside jobs, Torres as bar manager at The Independent in San Francisco, and Gerbing as a bartender at the Fox Theater in Oakland.
“When Summer and I bought the Ivy Room we wanted to have a bar and maybe some music on weekends,” Torres said. “But we realized the community wanted music all the time.”
The pair expanded their vision beyond a corner bar.
“We updated everything and added a stage,” Torres said. “We invested in our equipment.
It’s known as a goodsounding room.”
Gerbing is the Ivy’s beverage director (the drink menu includes beer and spirits made locally) and Torres books the talent, with a criteria of acts that can attract 100 to 200 people.
The cozy venue, which holds about 200, and the openness to featuring an array of styles — “from all genres of music — from roots and country to jazz, rock and hip hop” as the night spot notes on its website — has won the Ivy Room a reputation among performers.
“We have a lot of local bands and we’ve had some big names that played secret shows,” Torres said, among them Billie Joe A rmstrong per forming with Green Day side project the Coverups in 2018.
“We had to tell Hardly Strictly about ourselves in putting the application together and it was pretty eye-opening to realize what it means to the community,” Torres said. “We’ve come a long way in a short time.”
If all goes well and the restrictions of the shutdown are eased, Gerbing and Torres hope to hold live performances in the spring at the club’s outdoor seating area and possibly a sausage and beer event at the San Pablo and Solano corner.
As they wait for the