Night life returning to downtown Cedar Rapids

The downtown night life is coming back.

With more places to choose from, more people are showing up on evenings and weekends. Steve Emerson believes the turning point came this past winter.

“Winter's always a good time for bars,” says Emerson, who owns several downtown buildings and whose tenants include the Blue Strawberry, Zins and the Piano Lounge. “It is becoming a destination again, and there's a lot more traffic on the streets right now.”

Some bars - Legends and Muddy Waters, for instance - never returned after the flood, but the Piano Lounge and Volume were back within five months, and business has gradually improved since.

“I don't think it's awesome, but it's not bad considering what happened,” says Brett Klein, one of the managers at the Piano Lounge.

The Piano Lounge - which is below ground in one of Emerson's buildings in the 200 block of Second Avenue SE - returned with its dingy pre-flood beer taps immortalized in a glass case on the wall.

Business is slow during the week, Klein says, but the addition of new bars - DC's River Walk and Dublin City on First Street SE, both of which serve food - has helped bring more people downtown.

What would really improve business is for more people to live downtown, Klein says.

“It seems really obvious to me. I think it's just a lack of people living downtown,” he says.

When Klein thinks about the big picture, though, he's encouraged. Eight years ago, when he started bartending at Brick's Bar & Grill, it was the “only place where people really partied downtown.”

By the spring of 2008, Second Avenue SE hummed with activity on Friday and Saturday nights. Crowds walked from Zins or now-defunct Blend to the Piano Lounge and hopped from what's now Volume to Brick's and then the old Dublin City, which is now Teaghen's.

It wasn't the Ped Mall in Iowa City, but it was improving.

The flood interrupted the improvement. Blend reopened after the flood but folded in January. For several months the Piano Lounge and Volume struggled to get traffic. It's taken awhile for business to grow, and it's still not as good as it was before the flood, Klein says.

One scene that may be better than before is New Bohemia.

Parlor City Pub and Eatery and the Chrome Horse on Third Street SE say business is good. Also on that street, a new bar and restaurant is expected to open in the old Village Bank, and the owner of Papa Juan's/Stefano's is looking to convert Brosh funeral home into a restaurant.

“Bars and restaurants function a lot better in clusters,” Emerson says.

Jayme Kleve, a bartender at the Chrome Horse, says bicyclists on the trails have been stopping en masse at the motorcycle bar and having Parlor City nearby builds crowds on weekends.

People also can cross the Cedar River and visit bars and restaurants in the Czech Village.

“In five years, it's going to be nuts down here,” Kleve says.