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A bar on North St. Mary’s Street will close its doors at the end of July. The owner pointed to construction on the street for more than two years as the main reason for closing.
North St. Mary’s Street, known to locals as “the Strip,” is home to several blocks of bar hopping, live music, an arcade bar, a pool hall, and food trucks. When owner Aaron Pena opened Squeezebox in 2016, he wanted it to be a conjunto bar, but that eventually evolved into a dance and nightclub vibe … and it flourished.
“The first four years were amazing. We actually had a $1 million business multiple times during the first four years,” he said. “At least three of those years were $1 million annual sales years.”
But during the pandemic and then two years of construction — during which at points the entire road was closed block by block — he said business dropped heavily.
“The street was inaccessible — just complete rubble — and I think the narrative was you just couldn’t reach us for the past two years, so people just weren’t coming out [and] weren’t spending money,”
Video he recorded in December shows a portion of the street completely closed and torn apart. He said that was when he began to see a difficult path forward. In late June, he announced the bar would be closing, just weeks before construction on the St. Mary’s Strip is expected to be completed.
“The death blow has been seeing that the street’s almost complete and knowing that we’re still in the hole for well over $200,000,” he said. “And we kind of knew a year ago that we might not make it to see the completion of the street.”
This isn’t Pena’s only operation. He has another bar, and he plans to open a new bar with a partner a few miles down on South St. Mary’s in Southtown next week.
“It’s actually really serendipitous and kind of awkward timing because I’m getting ready to lose one of my businesses and open another, so I haven’t really had time to properly process what’s happening here,” Pena said.
Business owners have echoed similar frustrations on the construction. Not just on North St. Mary’s, but other major streets like Broadway, New Braunfels, and Commerce. The City of San Antonio has acknowledged that the North St. Mary’s project has taken longer than intended.
"We had some unknown utility conditions, because this is an old part of town, we had very deep trenches,” said Razi Hosseini, director of the city’s public works department.
Hosseini said those trenches are what led to entire blocks being closed instead of alternating traffic that would have kept a couple lanes open.
“It was unsafe for the public to drive next to very deep trenches. It’s unsafe for the contractor to work on the trenches,” he said.
The city addressed the delay a few times over the construction period, had numerous meetings with people who live and work along the street, and brought in another contractor to try to speed things up. Now, it’s nearly done.
“After it's done, it’s going to be on the street parking, bike lanes, landscaping, wider sidewalks, [and] lights to be safer — especially since most of the customer comes over there at night,” he said.
In January, the city set up a fund using COVID-19 relief money to provide grants of up to $35,000 on businesses that experienced prolonged construction. Pena did take that full grant money, but he said it equated to about two months rent.
By early June, the city distributed about $2.4 million of that money.
Since the fund is temporary, Councilmembers Marc Whyte and Jalen McKee-Rodriguez submitted a proposal this month to create a permanent construction mitigation fund. Whyte represents the city’s Northeast Side.
“Businesses will be able to apply to get a grant to get some of that money based upon showing that they’ve been financially impacted by the construction in and around their premises,” he said.
The plans, however, appear uncemented. There isn’t a funding mechanism yet, but Whyte said it could potentially come from excess CPS Energy revenues, which could help replenish it.
“We’ll know that these dollars are directly going to small businesses to assist them when some sort of city initiated project is getting in the way of their business, that just makes good sense to me,” he said.
Their proposal has the support of three other council members: Sukh Kaur, Marina Aldarete Gavito, and Melissa Cabello Havrda. These types of council requests can sometimes take months of city refining, though, before they are brought up for a vote. And with the proposed 2024 city budget just a few weeks away from being presented, it’s unclear when it would be considered.
At the Squeezebox, Pena has a neon sign that says, “Lost her to The Strip,” which, he said, means his original idea for the bar evolved.
“Now it has a little bit of foreshadowing behind it, that we inevitability just did lose her altogether but, you know, an amazing seven years, and we’re thankful,” he explained.
This weekend will see the Squeezebox’s last days before it closes.
