Bloomfield Ave Cafe & Stage

The Room

Bloomfield Ave Cafe & Stage was a 250-capacity all-ages venue at 347 Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair, New Jersey. I opened it in 2002, the same year I started DBL Systems, and we ran it until 2007. It was my first business.

It was a DIY punk venue. Calling it anything else would be rewriting history. I came up going to basement shows, and Bloomfield Ave was one step up from a basement: a real stage, a real PA, a door, and not much else. The room was small and it got hot. In the summer you could see steam coming out the front doors. That was a feature. The shows were close, loud, and completely unmediated, which is what an all-ages room is supposed to be.

We were all kids while we were running it. Nobody involved had done it before, it showed, and it mostly worked anyway.

Who Played

The venue sat in the middle of the early-2000s New Jersey scene, in the years when a band could play a 250-cap room one season and something much bigger the next. My Chemical Romance played it. So did the Jonas Brothers, before most people had heard of them, along with Fall Out Boy, Paramore, The Gaslight Anthem, Steel Train, Silverstein, Jack’s Mannequin, Plain White T’s, The Starting Line, and Alexisonfire.

The touring bands weren’t really the point, though. Most of the calendar was local, New Jersey bands playing to New Jersey kids. What the room actually did was give teenagers somewhere to see a show in a small space, on a Friday night, without needing a ride into the city, for a ticket price a teenager could cover.

Twenty years on, I still run into people who bring up a show they saw at Bloomfield Ave Cafe. That’s the part that stuck.

What It Taught Me

The room taught me community building before I had a word for it. You’re booking, staffing, working the door, handling the neighbors, and building whatever systems make it repeatable, all on revenue that’s thin by design because tickets have to stay cheap enough for kids to buy them. What holds a place like that together isn’t the margin. It’s whether people feel like it belongs to them.

That’s the thread through most of what came after. Cowerks and Fresh Markets are the same problem in different clothes. Make a place people want to be in, then build the operation that lets it survive.