So if you’ve been paying attention to my Twitter feed at all over the past couple of days, you’ll likely have noticed that I’ve spent the last two evenings at Chicago’s newest music venue, Lincoln Hall. And you’ll also have noticed that I had a number of small complaints about the club.

Well, I wanted to do a quick post [ed.: yeah, it didn't end being "quick" at all - sorry] here on the blog to reassess some of my concerns, provide some updates that I’ve gotten from the Lincoln Hall folks themselves, and to make one thing very clear in case I hadn’t already – this is a very, very good club, and nearly a great one.

Before we get there, though, a bit of background.  For those unfamiliar, Lincoln Hall is the new venue from Chris and Mike Schuba, the owners of Schuba’s, one of the most respected, popular clubs in Chicago.  The new venue has a capacity of about 500 people, and fills a pretty big gap in the Chicago scene – the vast majority of Chicago’s rock clubs (that I’ve been to, at least) have capacities of about 200-300 (Schubas, Empty Bottle, etc.), 1,000-1,500 (Metro, Vic), or 2,500+ (Riviera, Aragon).  The only other true mid-size club I can think of is the Double Door, and, to be honest, I haven’t heard good things about it, though I haven’t personally been there yet.*

So in a lot of ways, Lincoln Hall seems to fill the same role for Chicago in 2009 as Bowery Ballroom did for New York in 1997 – it adds a high quality, mid-sized “showcase” room to a big music city that doesn’t have one. And the comparisons to the Bowery don’t end there – in many ways, Lincoln Hall is a newer, fancier version of the Bowery, with the same general layout (just without the staircase connecting the floor and the upstairs), the same great acoustics, and the same great booking.  In fact, there were several times over the last couple of nights that I almost thought I was standing in the New York rather than Chicago. (Alternatively, for those of you in DC, it’s also fair to think of Lincoln Hall as a 60% smaller version of the 9:30 Club.)

But for all of the club’s good aspects, a few negatives have definitely stood out over the last couple of nights. Most of the problems stem from the fact that, despite being an approximately 500-person club, the official capacity for the main downstairs floor is just 169 people.  I don’t know how strictly they enforce this, but they do have employees at both entrances to the floor who have hand-counters keeping track of how many people are on the floor.  So, theoretically, nearly 2/3 of the venue’s capacity has to stand upstairs rather than downstairs.  That in and of itself isn’t a problem, but it leads to a few pretty serious issues:

First, there’s the bathroom problem – unfortunately, there are no bathrooms on the main floor.  So if you’re on the floor, you actually need to leave and go to the front restaurant area to use the bathroom.  Again, not a big deal, but what happens at a sold-out show where the floor hits capacity while you’re in the bathroom?  Conceivably, you could get locked out, away from your friends, and be forced to go upstairs for the remainder of the show.

This then leads to a second, bigger problem – as of now, I just don’t see the upstairs area accommodating 300+ people.  There might be plenty of standing room for that number (although I’m not sure about that), but the only people upstairs who are actually going to SEE the stage are those people along or near the railing.  And, unfortunately, the past couple of nights it’s been very, very hard to get a spot near the railing.

First there’s the fact that about 30% of the upstairs railing area is reserved for VIP (standard, I know, but stay with me).  Then there’s the fact that the venue has had a security guard standing in the dead-center portion of the railing each night, taking up valuable space where patrons should be able to stand.  And, on top of that, there’s the fact that the venue has a bunch of bar stools sitting upstairs, and that people were pulling them over to sit on next to the railing – again, taking up more space than necessary, and depriving other patrons of valuable standing room.

When you add it all up, I’d say that only about 40-50% of the upstairs railing was actually accessible to normal, standing patrons the last couple of nights.  And, honestly, that’s just not going to accommodate 300+ people.

Moving away from the upstairs/downstairs issue, there are a few other small issues that kinda bugged me:

- The beers they sell are too small. They sell beer for $5, which seems cheap for this type of club, but they serve them in what seem to be 10 ounce cups. Maybe they’re 12 ounces, I dunno. But they feel like kiddie cups. I’d rather spend $7 on a full-size beer than have to leave my spot multiple times to get small cups of beer.

- They seem to allow people to bring in drinks in glass from the restaurant area. You don’t see many clubs that allow people to have glass on the floor, and there’s a reason for that. Hopefully this was just a lapse by the guy at the door. Glass on the floor is a bad idea. As is, to be honest, wait service on the floor. Too many people moving about and knocking into people. I saw a wait person lose an entire tray of beer on the floor last night. That woulda been real ugly if glass had been involved.

- They don’t have enough trash cans. On Sunday night I spent about 5 minutes looking around for a trash can for my 10 ounce beer cup, eventually asking a security guard who graciously took the cup for me since there wasn’t a trash can in view. I finally discovered a very small trash can along the left-hand side of the floor last night, though I honestly don’t know why they wouldn’t have one near the doors separating the club from the restaurant. They’re essentially asking patrons just to throw them on the floor.

- It’s not easy to find the person who gives out drink wristbands. The venue actually has two separate entrances from the street – one is for patrons with last names from A-M, and the other is for patrons with last names from N-Z and guest list folks (all tickets are will call). Apparently the A-M door has someone giving out wristbands outside the club — the N-Z door does not. So if you have a last name falling between N and Z, you actually have to wait in two lines – one line outside to get your wristband, and then a separate line at a different entrance to get into the club. Silly.

- Finally, I’d love to see them find a way to move the speakers that are currently sitting at the corners of the stage. They’re about 5-6 feet tall and effectively block the view of anyone standing off to the side of the stage up front. Two DC clubs (9:30 Club and Rock and Roll Hotel) recently fixed their own version of this problem, and hopefully it’s something on Lincoln Hall’s radar. It doesn’t affect a huge swath of the floor, but it does effectively take a couple hundred square feet of floor space out of play, ensuring that the rest of the floor is just a bit more crowded than it needs to be.

So, yeah, that’s a lot of nitpicking. But, despite the length of this post, the fact remains that the bulk of these issues really are small in the grand scheme of things. The venue is beautiful, the sound is excellent, and the two shows I’ve seen there have been great experiences. I just think that a few small changes could take Lincoln Hall from a very good club to a world-class one.

Oh, and it should be noted that the Lincoln Halls folks seem to be completely devoted to making the club a better place. In response to my tweets on the subject, they actually reached out and told me that they’re actively working on a couple of these issues. Apparently the security person along the railing is a temporary fix until they can build a “roof” for the soundboard area at the back of the floor to ensure that no one spills a drink from along the railing onto the electronics. Also, while they’re still trying to figure out when it’s appropriate to let people pull stools alongside the railing, they’re going to definitely stop letting people do it during sold out shows. So that’s good, and a good sign of how serious they are about making this a great venue.

* apparently Subterranean has a capacity of about 400, but it really doesn’t feel like it. It’s a good venue, but I’d be more likely to call it a small club than a mid-sized club. Oh, and I have no idea how big Bottom Lounge is, and haven’t been there yet.