Pete Freedman
There Will Be No Re-Branding This Time: Travis Street Hotspot Rio Room/The Travis Is Done For Good.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but the Travis Street nightclub spot once known as Suite and then as Rio Room and then as The Travis and then as Rio Room once more is now officially, one hundred percent done.
“Sad but true,” says the club’s managing partner Matthew Giese when reached for comment about the news that the space had already quietly shuttered.
Over the years, the club’s high moments were pretty damn notable, with the space hosting everything from Dirk Nowitzki’s birthday party to a Super Bowl week performance from Cee Lo Green to surprise sets from Diplo, Calvin Harris and Marina & The Diamonds. More recently, the space made a name for itself by hosting various celebrities as party guests — with 50 Cent, Nelly, French Montana and others among those names. For a year and a half, the basement of the venue also acted as the home to DJ Sober’s popular Big Bang! weekly on Thursday nights, and, for one night, it even served as the host to our once-recurring Pop That! party.
The venue’s lows centered around the spot’s back-and-forth branding, fluctuating drink prices and its tendency to fall off the map — and even close its doors — for months at a time.
Well, no more of that. Giese confirms that the venue’s future is done, what with the long-coming plans for a new apartment complex on its land near the intersection of Travis and Knox finally coming to fruition and the venue’s property owner refusing to re-up the club’s lease so as to prepare for that development. In other words: There will be no re-branding this time; just a regular old closure.
“Time to move on,” Giese says.
For him, he says that means developing some properties in the Design District and looking into the possibility of opening a new venue there, although he says there’s “nothing specific planned yet.”
In the meantime, we’ll just mourn the formal loss of what Rio/The Travis was at its peak — a place where Dallas’ often too-segregated populations came together to let loose, mesh pretty beautifully with one another and party with abandon.