Live music on hold at The Press Room

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[Editor’s note: this story was updated on July 15 at 5:50 p.m. to include comments from Portsmouth deputy fire chief Carl Roediger.]

Walk by The Press Room on Daniel Street in Portsmouth any evening this month and you’ll hear something peculiar: silence.

Live music is on hiatus at the downtown venue until the bar has a sprinkler and fire safety system installed. The city’s fire department ordered the bar to halt live entertainment on July 1, according to bar manager Tristan Law.

State and city law requires music venues to have sprinkler and fire systems installed that are monitored off-site by a third party. The regulations are the result of a fire at The Station nightclub in Rhode Island in 2003. A fire caused by pyrotechnics that were part of the band Great White’s stage show killed 100 people and injured 230.

Law said city fire department officials gave The Press Room two years to install a sprinkler system; however, the bar didn’t meet the deadline. Though live music is on hold, the bar can still serve food and drinks.

Portsmouth deputy fire chief Carl Roediger said the department met with Press Room owner Jay Gardner in 2013 to discuss installing a sprinkler and fire alarm system in order to meet city and state life safety codes. Those codes require venues that offer live entertainment and have a capacity for 100 people or more have sprinkler and fire systems. The department and Gardner agreed that a sprinkler system would be installed by July 1 of this year, Roediger said.

“We realize the installation pieces that go along with (those systems), and they have a tendency to be expensive and are something you want to budget for, so we gave them two years to get these … modifications in place,” he said.

Roediger said the department has worked with other venues in the city, most recently the Dolphin Striker, to bring sprinkler and fire systems up to code. He added that no other entertainment venues in the city are currently in violation of fire and life safety codes.

Because the codes relate to live entertainment, Roediger said the department was willing to work with the Press Room to keep the venue open for food and drink. He added that the department frequently contacted Gardner about the approaching July 1 deadline.

“We don’t want to shut them down, so we” ordered them to halt live music, he said. “We don’t like to have to put the prohibition in place, but in this case, we had to.”

The Press Room is famous for having live music every night, and Law said the venue is working with musicians to find new homes for the shows already scheduled for this month. Venues in Portsmouth, like 3S Artspace and the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, have stepped forward to help; so have clubs outside the city, such as The Stone Church in Newmarket, he said.

“They’ve been really kind,” he said.

And, while some acts have canceled, others, particularly solo or acoustic acts, have adapted. Regional folk artists Dan Blakeslee and Jonah Tolchin recently performed on the sidewalk in front of the bar.

“That was fun,” Law said.

Law said that Gardner has plans to install a sprinkler system. The system costs about $42,000 and should take approximately two weeks to install.

“The sad part about many of these codes … is many of (them) have been paid for in blood, and we try and take those very seriously,” Roediger said. “We know the Press Room is working on the sprinkler and fire alarm systems as we speak, and we hope music will be back there before summer’s out.”

Until then, Law said, the lack of live music “sucks.”

“It really kills us; this is what sets us apart from other places,” he said. “We’ve still got a good crew that comes in (for food and drink), but nowhere near the amount of people who come in for music.” — Larry Clow