Jerome Cherry turned the old Outback Lodge into Deuces Lounge with the best of intentions, making the place "a lot cleaner," "very secure" and billing it as "a remix on the Charlottesville night scene." But after spending about $30,000 on renovations—and operating for less than four months—Cherry and his wife are walking away.
A year-long restriction on the club’s ABC license made it too hard to get the business off the ground, says Cherry, allowing the club only to serve beer, wine and champagne until midnight. "Most people don’t come out until 10 or 10:30, and a lot of people don’t come out to 11. And I have to stop serving them at 12 o’clock."
That meant that people would get drunk elsewhere, and then come to Deuces Lounge and get angry when the club would stop serving. (Contrary to some rumors, Deuces didn’t violate its ABC license, according to Jennifer Farinholt, a public relations specialist with VABC.)
The straw the broke the camel’s back? "We had a little spat out in the parking lot, and somebody ended up with a compound fracture," he says. Cherry says that he took a long weekend to think about the club’s future. "If we continue to go, the place is going to put our names right where [Outback Lodge owner] Terry [Martin] was."
"My wife and I just got to the point where we were struggling to pay our bills," says Cherry. "After [the fight], I just saw that it was not at the hands of us, and it was really turning out like it used to be. And I wanted no part of it," he says.
Can 917 Preston Ave. house a successful club?