The nightclub industry is a breeding ground for gossip, and rumors that Sonotheque was closing—its last day was Saturday the 14th—had been floating around for some time before Time Out Chicago Web editor John Dugan confirmed the news in a November 10 blog post. He also reported that the dance-music venue at 1444 W. Chicago was being sold. My Twitter feed was immediately swamped with reaction, and oddly most of the tweets I saw focused on the bare fact of Sonotheque’s closure, not on the identities of the new owners. Among them is Paul Devitt, the man behind the Beauty Bar clubs in New York, LA, Vegas, and elsewhere, who’s since verified that Sonotheque will become a Chicago outpost of the chain.
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Finkelman and Toalson met Devitt a couple years ago at South by Southwest—Austin has its own Beauty Bar—and struck up a friendship that so far has segued smoothly into a business partnership. All three have been scoping out potential Beauty Bar locations in Chicago for at least two years, by Devitt’s reckoning, including a few in Logan Square. “I came out there and looked at spaces,” he says, “but everything fell through. Now finally it’s working out.”
When the Bottle contingent approached the rest of the owners with the proposal that they sell to Levitt, the idea grew legs. Owners old and new agree that Sonotheque’s time was simply up. “I think everything has its shelf life,” says Bryl, who also programmed music at the club. “I think when we first started out doing Sonotheque we envisioned it as a listening-lounge type of a place where you could just come in and chill out and listen to beats and grooves, something like a Wax Poetics-slash-Dusty Groove-slash-Straight No Chaser vibe. Then it slowly metamorphosized, intentionally and for other reasons, into a dance club.”
From what I’ve seen, the Beauty Bar in LA is a little nicer than the one in Austin, and they’re both swankier than the New York location. But even though they’re not branded as strictly as, say, Krispy Kreme or McDonald’s franchises, they have something in common besides the theme of their decor: none of them approaches music with the obsessive devotion that Sonotheque did.
