Features
The Last Independent Venue on Meridian Street
By Rosa Lindqvist · Issue 42
Three hundred capacity, one working smoke machine, zero corporate sponsorship. A night inside the room the city forgot to close.
The Foundry has outlived every chain venue within a mile of it, not by adapting but by refusing to. The stage floor is bowed from two decades of drum kits; the dressing room walls are a palimpsest of rider demands and phone numbers. On a Thursday night in January, the room fills to exactly 240 people for a local four-band bill.
The economics are absurd and everyone involved knows it. The owner, a former tour manager named Anita Cole, books the room on a handshake and pays guarantees out of the bar. "If I was doing this for money I'd have sold the sign to a developer," she says, gesturing at the neon that has said FOUNDRY since 1998.
Tonight's headliners, North Circuit, have played the room seven times — more than any other band. Their set is loud, loose and unrepeatable. Afterward, the drummer packs his kit in the alley while a queue forms for the merch table. The room will be a construction site in eighteen months. For now, it is still the best-sounding hundred-dollar room in the city.