The Rotterdam will rise again

It’s not very often you get to write about a victory for the little guy. That’s what makes this story so special.

In our June 13 issue, we featured the ‘Save The Rotterdam’ campaign. In case the story passed you by, The Rotterdam is a bar and music venue in the Sailortown area of Belfast that was due to be demolished to make way for an apartment block. Regular patrons started a campaign to save their favourite watering hole, on the grounds that it was a cultural landmark Belfast couldn’t afford to lose.
Not only had the bar originally been a holding pen for prisoners on their way to the Tasmanian penal colony, but over the years its stage has been graced by the likes of Van Morrison, Luka Bloom, Christy Moore, Snow Patrol, David Gray, Duke Special and Katie Melua. There is even rumoured to have been an impromptu session in 1966 from Bob Dylan, with a certain Mr Martin Scorsese in accompaniment.
The campaigners likened the bar to Belfast’s version of The Cavern Club. But where the original Cavern was demolished as part of the construction of the Merseyrail underground railway line, it seems The Rotterdam may have survived the developers’ curse.
Rena Maguire, one of the campaign organisers, was thrilled to inform hotpress that the developers have handed control of the bar over to former owner Chris Ruddy on a temporary basis, to see if it can be made into a viable music venue.
“We’re delighted that the developers have given us this chance to prove that this is a sustainable bar. We’re hoping that they can see that something that’s as old as The Rotterdam is most certainly worthwhile keeping permanently open.
“The place was at its height when Chris Ruddy last ran it,” Rena continued. “It’s basically a dream situation having somebody like himself involved with The Rotterdam again. I think it shows absolutely terrific imagination on the part of the developers that they would take this chance and go for it.”
Chris told Hot Press that being involved with The Rotterdam again is “like coming home”. This is not the first time Chris has brought The Rotterdam back from the dead.
“I rebuilt the bar in 1984,” he says. “It had been blown up twice and left derelict before I rebuilt it. I was on the dole at the time so we had to reclaim and ‘liberate’ materials from various sites around Belfast to build it back up again.”
This time around, Chris has the support of the bar’s owners to keep it open on a trial run to see if he can make a success of the place once again.
“The bar was just lying empty,” he said. “It’s being kept open for at least nine months, probably twelve. But I’ve intentions of keeping it open for much longer than that.”
When Rena and fellow folk musician Davey ‘Ludwig’ O’Neill started the ‘Save The Rotterdam’ campaign, they never expected it to have the impact that it did.
“We were shocked by the amount of people who got in contact,” Rena said. “There were moments when we got communications from people like Christy Moore when, I have to say, I turned into a bit of a fangirl. The response from musicians has been especially amazing. There were a lot of them, both famous and local, who basically said, ‘We’re on board, if you need us we’re here’. And we absolutely appreciate every one of them.”
Stepping back inside the venue again was an emotional experience for everyone involved with the campaign. “Davey cried quite openly and was very, very emotional,” Rena said. “For me, it felt almost like an ‘upper room’ moment. Basically I was cleaning and painting the place before it re-opened and I said to myself, ‘This must be exactly how the apostles felt about the “upper room” they talk about in the bible’. Everything in the place was exactly the same, but yet somehow it had changed in some strange way. It was as if a wind had blown through the place and cleaned out any negativity. It’s like being given a second chance. It’s like the manifestation of what can happen when people work with developers who have imagination. It just goes to show what can happen.”
But the campaign’s work isn’t finished yet. Although they are delighted that the bar has been re-opened, the ideal situation would be to have the building listed as a place of historical significance so that it can never be threatened with demolition again.
“I think we’ll all feel a lot safer if the building’s listed. That’s on-going. We’re building up a history at the moment for them. We just discovered that Bob Dylan played the bar in 1966. Apparently he was with Martin Scorsese. We’re told a film was being made called Mr. Tambourine Man, a documentary Martin Scorsese was involved in.”
The film eventually became No Direction Home, the cinematic bible for those who worship at the altar of Bob.
“Apparently the two of them toddled in pissed as newts and somebody at the bar shouted up, ‘Hey, you look like Bob Dylan’,” Rena continued. “He answered, ‘That’s because I am Bob Dylan, man.’ ‘Get up and have a wee song so,’ they said to him. And he did. With Martin Scorsese playing the harmonica. So, if Bob wants to revisit us any time we’d be more than happy to have him over!”
Given that this bar once looked certain to be banished to the indexes of Belfast’s music history, far stranger things could happen.