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Date: 10/6/2023
NORTHAMPTON — After being shuttered since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Iron Horse Music Hall will see a light at the end of the tunnel at some point in 2024.
The Parlor Room, a nonprofit listening room and school of music on 32 Masonic St., announced at the end of September that they had officially completed an agreement with current owner Eric Suher to purchase the iconic Iron Horse Music Hall, which is located on 20 Center St. The agreement comes with the venue’s liquor license as well as a 15-year lease to operate the venue.
“This feels awesome,” said Chris Freeman, the president of the Parlor Room Foundation, during an interview with Reminder Publishing. “There’s all this community support around the Iron Horse reopening … so the idea that we’re going to get to run it and renovate it and build it into the place that our community deserves it to be is a deep honor and we’re really excited.”
Freeman said the deal with Suher is likely to close at the end of October, which means the lease will officially begin on Nov. 1.
“We’re talking with builders and with architects now, and we’re working with restaurant partners and considering how we’re going to book the room and all that,” Freeman said of the current plans.
Freeman said that there is no official timetable for when shows will begin at the Iron Horse, but Freeman said he is aiming for late winter or early spring. He said the process for opening will include a multi-phased approach.
“The way that it opens at the very beginning will likely not be with finished renovations,” Freeman said.
“It will be some form of finished renovations that we’ll be expanding into, but our goal is to be able to open as soon as possible and then in a way where we can continue to make renovations, but without having to close for an extended period of time with those renovations.”
According to Freeman, the Iron Horse currently needs some stage renovations, kitchen upgrades, as well as new flooring installed. They are also working on a plan to move the bathrooms upstairs and Freeman said there are plans to maintain the food service that was there before it closed since most people enjoyed that aspect of the hall.
The first phase will specifically include flooring, sound system, lighting, stage and bar enhancements funded in part by a substantial ARPA grant of $73,000 from the city.
“We’re not trying to change the things that people loved about it,” Freeman said of the plans and renovations. “We’re trying to just fix the things that needed to be fixed.”
The purchase comes in the midst of a series of efforts from the Northampton License Commission to force Suher to either sell or reopen his music venues — which include The Basement, The Green Room, Calvin Theater, Pearl Street Night Club and Iron Horse. This process has been going on since February, when the commission revoked one of his liquor licenses.
Suher then appealed the revocation to the state before he and the commission came to agreement that gave him until the end of September to either open the venues himself or sell the licenses.
The Iron Horse was originally established in 1979 and purchased by Suher in 1995. The hall was a major destination for live music in Northampton until it closed in March 2020 due to COVID-19. Aside from a performance in 2021 that ultimately fell through, the hall has been closed since.
"We’re very happy to see that the Iron Horse is going to continue in very good hands and we’re appreciative of the city for doing what they’ve done on their part to help move that along,” Suher said about the purchase during a License Commission meeting on Oct. 2. “I think we found a very good operator and the city has been very helpful in terms of allowing certain funding, et cetera to help the Parlor Room make a deal happen.”
The Parlor Room, meanwhile, was originally opened by the acoustic music record label Signature Sounds back in 2012. Since then, the venue has been home to hundreds of performances over the past decade, including Lake Street Drive, Black Francis, Anais Mitchell, Adrienne Lenker and Juliana Hatfield.
They transitioned to a nonprofit model late last year.
“We want to create spaces in our community where music can happen and that the community feels like they are invested in them and invested in our own economic health in downtown, our own individual health in terms of being able to get on stage and connect with audience members and artists and all of that stuff,” Freeman said. “That’s our main goal.”
Freeman, who is from Connecticut originally, said he remembers going to the Iron Horse for shows during his formative years. He said those experiences mixed with his history and work with Signature Sounds as a singer and multi-instrumentalist for the Americana/folk rock group Parsonsfield are major reasons why he moved to Northampton.
He said it was painful to see the Iron Horse shutter, so when the License Commission made that deal with Suher regarding the licenses, Freeman reached out to see Suher and met with him seven or eight times to converse about the venue before finalizing the deal in September.
Freeman said that the Iron Horse space aligns with their mission at the Parlor Room.
“There’s a lot of benefits of us being able to move artists from here to the Iron Horse or vice versa, to have these two venues that are close together and we can really be the foundation for this incredible, incredible scene that has been built here,” Freeman said.
The acquisition of the Iron Horse also gives Freeman an opportunity to book an even wider range of acts than he already does at the Parlor Room.
“The fact that it’s a combination of standing and seated, you can have that pit right in the front is awesome,” Freeman said. “You could theoretically have a show that has a dance floor and a pretty rock club vibe in the pit while having different audience members seated at a table and just enjoying it in a totally different way.”
Freeman said that he is excited to contribute to the economic vitality of downtown Northampton.
“Our mission is to enhance the health and vitality of our community through the power of music,” Freeman said. “And that goes, that’s both on an economic level and an individual level, where we want to meet every single person wherever they’re at for how music fits into their life.”
The Parlor Room will be announcing a capital campaign for the Iron horse project on Nov. 1. The announcement also said that, moving forward, the original Parlor Room venue will persist as an intimate performance venue and as the headquarters for their School of Music.
The Iron Horse was sold for a total of $150,000, according to Annie Lesko, Northampton’s administration, licensing and economic development coordinator.