This main upstairs venue is soon all that will be left of the legendary Black Cat. (Photo by Intangible Arts)

It’s the end of an era. This weekend, at the Black Cat’s 25th anniversary celebration, owner Dante Ferrando will announce that he’s rearranging the iconic bar and music venue on 14 Street NW. By the end of the year, the entire downstairs—the sprawling Red Room bar and Backstage, the smaller music venue—will close down.

The Washington Post was the first to report on the changes Wednesday, which include moving the Red Room upstairs and having it serve as a smaller music venue.

The Black Cat first opened in 1993, and has long been a fixture of D.C.’s underground music scene. It’s hosted both locally and globally famous musicians for more than two decades now, including Modest Mouse, Janelle Monae, The Shins, The Roots, Bright Eyes, Jeff Buckley, and The Strokes (the list is really too numerous to do any justice here).

But times have changed on 14th Street, and so has the clientele. Ferrando told the Post that changes in the neighborhood have made it so he just can’t fill the space in the main music venue. “If my employees have been priced out, my regulars have been priced out,” he told the paper.

The entire downstairs space is 7,500 square feet, Ferrando tells DCist, which he calls “totally crazy” to use for a small bar and concert space. The Red Room used to be driven mainly by large crowds that would stick around and hang out after big shows but, as times and habits change, Ferrando says that just doesn’t happen anymore.

“People just drink a lot earlier than they used to. They go out some place, drink, eat dinner, then come to the show and go home,” he says. That change has mostly made the Red Room another neighborhood bar, and the huge space just doesn’t feel right for that, according to Ferrando.

The new iteration of the Red Room will be upstairs, connected to the main venue, and a size that better matches the way his clientele use the bar, Ferrando says. Smaller musical acts that once would have played at Backstage will now play in the new Red Room, which will be set up to accommodate them.

Also, obviously, there’s an economic aspect, Ferrando says. “Labor is really expensive, and with such a large space, you have to have a big staff, and that makes it hard to make enough money to justify being open,” Ferrando says. “If you have a smaller space, you can have fewer staff working.”

According to the Post, Ferrando will be leasing out the street-level part of the building to new tenants who align more closely with recent developments in the neighborhood, like luxury furniture retailers.

Ferrando says he knows there will be grumbles of discontent among his clientele when the changes are announced. The same thing happened when the bar moved venues three doors down in 2001, but people mostly got over it, and he thinks the same thing will happen here.

“Whenever a place has changes, people are like, ‘but I liked the old thing,'” he says.

He also thinks that, in the long run, this move will help preserve the spirit of the Black Cat.

“It’s costing more and more to run a business, and I don’t want to get to the place where we have to start booking shows that we don’t want to book,” he says.