Local & State Headlines

New club to open downtown

• San Joes' owner buys a building and plans to open a second business in downtown Albany.

Susan McCord

ALBANY — While other businesses are moving out, Ramiro Alvarez has recently expanded his family’s holdings, and plans to open a second business in downtown Albany.

Nearly every table at San Joes, his Mexican restaurant on West Broad Avenue, filled up with a lunchtime crowd Friday as Alvarez revealed his plan to open a second business — “Eclipse,” a nightclub — just a few doors down.

San Joes stands out from the pack along the 200 block of West Broad, where most of the storefronts are vacant, or closed, including next-door neighbor Harvest Moon, a recent transplant to northwest Albany.

“It’s not as easy as it seems, but I’ve been hanging on,” said Alvarez, who has operated San Joes for almost two years with his wife, Glenda.

The family runs another successful restaurant, also called San Joes, on Main Street in Dawson, but is about to undertake a different new venture in the building at 212 West Broad, which most recently housed American Finance.

Eclipse will feature competitive karaoke, as well as nights of salsa and meringue music, wide open space to dance and a full bar, he said.

And while the club will welcome everyone, Alvarez said he’s gearing it toward an audience “older” than his 31 years that will include the area’s growing Hispanic community, many of whom work in all kinds of restaurants around Albany or in landscaping and construction.

Alvarez, who moved to Albany in 1999 to join his cousin in business at San Jose on Dawson Road, likes the pace of Albany over metro Atlanta’s Gwinnett County, where he’d lived since he was 4.

“The peace and quiet... The traffic’s much slower,” he said.

Opening Eclipse is “a risky business, considering the area that we’re moving into,” he said. “A lot of people are moving out, and I’m staying, and that’s kind of risky.”

But it’s all right, and his deciding to buy the American Finance building was a great savings in downtown lease payments, which topped $7,000 at the former Goodwill building closer to San Joes, Alvarez said.

With Harvest Moon gone, San Joes is downtown’s only nighttime eatery, but the restaurants are increasing — Riverfront BBQ, Two Scoops, Subway and the ever-popular Cookie Shoppe — and that’s actually good for business, he said.

After dark, only music venue the State Theater, nearby club Downtown Live and coffee shop Brown Bean contribute to foot traffic, but generally just on weekends.

Eclipse hopes to open in a few weeks — permits permitting.

The venture hit a snag after Alvarez closed on the building, when a city building inspector cited him for making improvements without a building permit.

“I was doing some work that I thought I was able to do,” he said.

A general contractor must apply for all the permits to do the interior work, he was told.

“That kind of stopped work, for over a month,” he said.

It was not the first stumbling block he’d seen a downtown business encounter.

Save a handful of storefronts and government offices, most buildings downtown were closed up or boarded up Friday.

“If they really want to help the businesses in downtown grow and be more successful, they can try to work with the people... because a lot of these buildings are out of code. They need a lot of work.”

Though it remains among the patient few, Downtown Live, at 242 West Broad Ave., has enjoyed only sporadic business during the last six months, DJ Vandale Dorsey said.

“It’s been slow, real slow,” said Dorsey, who travels to Albany some weekends to play music at the club, owned by Robert Taylor.

“Wherever people go, that’s where everybody goes,” Dorsey said.

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