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Weekend Mag Cover Story: These Aliens Like To Party
Friday, March 03, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
We gaze into the heavens seeking answers, knowing that when we find the truth it will have been deep inside of us all along. The cabals, the conspiracies that block our paths are merely speed bumps that complicate our quests for answers to the eternal questions.
Dave Kravitz seems an unlikely source, though he's certain that he possesses those answers. In a paint-stained T-shirt at a conference table in his cluttered office, he dispenses wisdom.
Why are we here? To spend money at his new Strip District nightclub.
What's out there? Nothing as cool as his place.
Are we alone? Not on the dance floor of Area 51.
The mystery of what will replace Penn Avenue's Strip Brewery, a brew pub that folded last year, has been revealed. Kravitz, a 30-year-old club and restaurant designer who grew up in Penn Hills, and his partner Jason Perla, have turned their mutual obsessions with spooky "X-Files" stuff and getting rich into Pittsburgh's first authentic theme club.
Sure, Have a Nice Day Cafe follows a theme that pop culture from the '70s shouldn't be forgotten, and Metropol's constant evolution of internal nuance is roughly a theme. And with lots of Pittsburgh rock 'n' roll memorabilia hanging on the walls and imprinted into the floor, there's sort of a theme at Nick's Fat City.
But when Kravitz says "theme," he means Disney World -- multiple rooms, multiple worlds, interconnected concepts, over-the-top extravagance. He means that the venue itself is its main attraction. And although he got his start pinning fish hooks and trolling nets onto the walls of seafood restaurants, Area 51 explores his wildest science-fiction fantasies.
Based on the restricted desert Air Force base where the U.S. government allegedly stores its collection of extraterrestrial star ships, Area 51 is out of this world. But the business behind it, says Kravitz, is down to earth.
"This is the future of American bars," he says. "They're going to be theme complexes where there are four or five themes in one. Disneyland."
While living in Florida and taking some oceanography courses, Kravitz became impregnated with the theme virus. With a personal interest in all things nautical and a natural artistic talent, he scavenged some work decorating a Fort Lauderdale seafood restaurant. He was designing the city's famous Rustic Inn Crab House, he says, when he was discovered by the people behind Baja Beach Club. Kravitz says his experience with one of the country's most successful corporate theme clubs gave him a rare education in the mysteries of nightclub management.
"I learned a lot from watching them set up," he says. "I watched Bajas go up in a month and do huge numbers initially. But it's a chance. [The nightclub industry] is the [most frequently] failing business in the United States."
Although Area 51 is the first start-up he's piloted, Kravitz says he designed 15 Baja Beach Clubs, multithemed entertainment complexes in Europe and eight Banana Joe's, including the one in Pittsburgh. All the while he was trying to get the Baja bunch to open a place in Pittsburgh with him at the helm.
"Pittsburgh is the last to get everything," he says. "We're 10 years behind everybody else. So the beach clubs were working everywhere, and I kept saying to Baja this is an open market here. We came close to signing a deal with Woodson's," former Steeler Rod Woodson's All-Star Grill, which last year filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization protection.
Kravitz and Perla finally landed on Penn Avenue.
The closing of the building's previous occupant, Strip Brewery, created a windfall for the new tenants. The young entrepreneurs took advantage of their predecessors' material upgrades and the fact that the nightlife corridor has stretched to Penn Avenue's 2100 block. Kravitz says the space came at a bargain.
"Strip Brewery came in here and spent the big money," he says. "They re-plumbed, they rewired, they did the walls. When I worked for Baja that's what I looked for ... spaces where other people did the real investment. [Strip Brewery] failed and we reaped their rewards. We came in here at auction and bought everything in the building practically for $10,000 or $12,000 [and got] $100,000 worth of stuff."
Now Kravitz and Perla have brought in their own "stuff" -- high-tech electronics, advanced creature comforts and lots of creepy, crawly nonhuman entities courtesy of Pittsburgh's scariest guy, Tom Savini, who moonlights as special-effects artist, director and actor. The whole place resonates with the clean, space-age lines of hybrid development based on recovered alien technology. Even the bar is a 24th-century light show.
Area 51 is less than half the size of Metropol. But Perla and Kravitz can cram people into the Brewery's former beer vat room; they've honeycombed the building with corridors and clever theme spaces and added a private, Net-wired VIP bar (free for first two weeks, then private) in what was once a back garage.
Valet parking is available, an extensive menu stretches from cheap munchies to top-dollar entrees, and giant TV screens beam in nonstop greetings from conspiratorial advertising agencies.
"Throughout the club we have big, flat screens where companies can put their futuristic, computer-type, digital imaging advertising," says Kravitz. "This is [part of a] $50 million network out of New York that will pump [images from] people like HBO and big car companies who are paying [the club] to have these really futuristic ads. The ads are productions; they're little movies. It looks like entertainment. It's the advertising of the future, they have it in Europe, and I'm trying to bring it here to Pittsburgh."
Area 51 will program live jazz at happy hour, says Kravitz, but most of the music will be techno and hip-hop spun by DJs imported from other cities.
Kravitz believes he's created a nightclub monster, a sophisticated conspiracy to abduct cash from unsuspecting wallets.
"We want to go after everybody," he says. "We want the corporate crowd. We want the UFO nut. We want the sci-fi nut. We want the guy who likes Mexican food. ... [We'll] have kids dancing out here with tongue rings and lawyers sitting in the VIP room eating steaks. ... We want the kids in here in the evening dancing and dancing and dancing. That's where the money is for me. You get people dancing, they're going to sweat, they're going to drink. And have a good time."
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NAME: Area 51
