Silver Shadows nightclub is known for its dance music, oldies night and house music. But soon it may also be known as a place for coffee and Internet connections or weddings.
The nearly 20-year-old Columbia nightclub, one of the county’s largest, has new owners with a few new ideas. Former Baltimore radio personality Kole Porter and his partner, R. Aaron Warren, purchased the club in May and have been working to spruce up the premises and expand its image. Although the club is well-established in the Baltimore-Washington area, Porter said the new challenge is to draw locals to the 7,700-square- foot scene in an office complex across Little Patuxent Parkway from The Mall in Columbia.
“There are 3,000 people who work in this building, but none of them come here for happy hour,” Porter said. “One of our most important jobs is to capture the local folks.”
Silver Shadows is one of the most popular nightclubs in the county, and has consistently drawn a mix of patrons onto its dance floors.
Baltimore radio station WERQ-FM has held its “Famous Q-Party” at the club every Friday night for five years. The program is a live broadcast with the station’s on-air personality, Konan.
Between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. every weekend and many weekdays, the parking lot for the quiet cul-de-sac of offices that is filled during the day with workers’ vehicles is emptied and filled again with partygoers of all ages.
A typical Friday night will see a 30-something crowd of professionals for a jazz happy hour until about 10:30. Then that crowd makes way for a post-college bunch eager to dance to hip-hop and house tunes. Tuesday’s oldies night draws the 40-plus crowd, and Thursday’s Latin dance party brings the salsa-lovers to the floor. Twice a month, on Sundays, turn-of-the-century beatniks gather for poetry parties.
The club opened in 1980 as The Library, a nightclub idea conceived by Peter Kirk, who at the time was a partner of building owner Patrick McCuan, according to a spokeswoman for McCuan’s MDG Companies. The spot – then only about 5,500 square feet with a capacity of about 250 – went through several incarnations before the Weider family from Long Island, N.Y., purchased it in 1988 and named the club the Native New Yorker.
Marcia Weider renamed the club Silver Shadows in 1990, and nurtured its reputation as a regional dance house, drawing crowds from Baltimore, Anne Arundel, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, as well as Washington.
Weider said that when she opened, she didn’t have a single customer, but now “that club is well known from New York, straight down to Atlanta, Ga.”
With all the work she put into the club, Weider said, she was very selective about who she would sell it to, but that she’s very comfortable with the new owners.
“I knew Kole, and I knew he would keep the same image that I had,” she said. “I felt he could make it work better than me.”
Porter and Weider met eight years ago when Porter was working in promotions for WWIN-FM. When Weider decided to sell, Porter was ready with a proposition. As president of 24th Century Marketing, he was looking for a cash-heavy business that could be leveraged for other endeavors, such as his work as a talent booking agent, or Warren’s work as an Internet service salesman. Silver Shadows fit the profile.
“It’s a very marketable launch pad into every other area we want to get into,” Warren said. “If I sell Internet service to an insurance agency, if they want to have their parties here, I can provide a venue once a year to have their company gathering. That will draw business to Silver Shadows and draw business to us in other areas.”
Eventually, Porter and Warren want to purchase a radio station to draw all the entertainment work together. But one of the immediate goals for Silver Shadows is to launch a daytime use for the club, retooling its image as an entertainment center.
The plans call for a fall opening of an Internet cafe, where Columbians can go for an afternoon coffee or beer and escape to a chat room or look up stock quotes. Video games are also being added to the premises, Porter said.
Howard County Chamber of Commerce President Ken Williams said he is glad to see the new owners are energetic with lots of ideas.
“Anything can work if you’ve got a good business plan and do some market research,” he said. “I think they can do some fabulous things over there.”
Since Porter and Warren have taken over, they’ve gotten inquiries from lots of new groups – martini clubs and sororities, for example – on ways to use the facility. Last month, the club was transformed into a wedding hall by accident when a couple rented the facility for a reception and rain canceled the bride and groom’s plans for an outdoor ceremony.
The partners say they are not turning down any ideas to maximize their investment.
“It’s a venue to utilize for anything and everything,” Warren said. “This facility goes hand-in-hand with everything we intend to do.”
