Millennium was a club at 747 Chambers Road which opened to tremendous fanfare, in either late 1999 or early 2000. Though heavily hyped, and seeming quite trendy at the time, it got off to a rocky start and didn’t last too terribly long. To my knowledge, we only visited this establishment once – which I had forgotten about anyway, until revisiting my notes recently. I remember the night quite well, but couldn’t recall where we had actually been, despite it not being the least bit wild. Which I suppose is a neat shorthand for the Millennium experience overall.
Another Brad Miller production (following beloved Mean Mr. Mustard’s on campus), it was shooting for the fences to some extent with its very location, on that weird little detached limb of Chambers Road, the part next to the Lennox shopping center. Which isn’t really any kind of dance club hotspot, then or now. Of course, it’s easy to say in hindsight this wasn’t the greatest location, after something has failed, whereas if he’d succeeded, we’d be calling owner Miller “visionary.” But you had an inkling that perhaps not every angle had been all that well thought out, like for example the parking. As reported by The Other Paper, though the club had been hyping up its free valet parking, on at least one occasion in January of 2000, the valets were dropping cars off in the Lennox lot…which were then subsequently towed. And this would continue to be a problem, mostly for unwitting patrons who didn’t know any better.
“How pathetic do you have to be to get a kick out of towing people?” Miller is quoted as bellyaching in the 2/10/00 edition of that paper.
Our visit occurs on March 18th of this year, to celebrate Big Paul’s birthday. This kind of scene was never his cup of tea, though, so I’m not sure how we decided upon this location. It was basically just the shiniest new toy in town and, having missed out on some heavily hyped clubs in the past, we wanted to check this one out before it was too late (one curious footnote about these extremely trendy dance spots is that they almost never last very long, no matter how popular they are; I don’t know if this is bad management, or being unable to outlive a pigeonhole to one short era/scene, or pure coincidence, or some combination thereof).
My notes on this place are somewhat slim, but coherent, at least. So that’s something. I observe that it’s all “hip hop music, swirling lights, and smoke machines cranked full tilt.” Which is a pretty generic description, and would apply to many similar enterprises, here and elsewhere. One weird touch however is that they are attempting to serve somewhat fancy food offerings, which you wouldn’t at all expect in a setting like this. In fact, you wouldn’t really expect them to have a menu here at all. Someone once told me that Ohio law says you must serve some type of food in every place that pours alcohol; I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but for many establishments, a clip strip of potato chips behind the bar neatly fulfills that obligation. Another oddity concerns the kinds of events they are hosting, like one just a month earlier – Valentine’s Day no less – meant to promote The Cure’s Bloodflowers CD release. Yet this isn’t really a goth establishment per se, not to mention that band is slightly past its commercial peak. So I’m wondering how that gala went over, and if they experienced any mad gate crashing.
Though the Other Paper notes how empty the dance floor was during their visit, it’s actually decently packed for us. Then again, by this point they’ve had an extra month or so to build up additional word of mouth. The problem for us guys instead is that, however predictable, the smattering of women here are surrounded by legions of dudes. As a result you might say, I take a shine to this one barmaid, and even leave her my phone number (unsolicited, true) on a napkin – this is not at all a very common move for me, and doesn’t lead anywhere, but seemed my best bet considering the circumstances.
Anyway, well, yes, you can probably guess the punchline from here. I don’t think this place made it even halfway through the decade. Their motto might have been “Fun With Style,” but it seems that this style, much like the name, was already somewhat passe the moment they first opened their doors.
