When the door goes up, people get down!
A Rochester man turned his garage into a bumping nightclub complete with DJs and security – but now he’s fighting to keep the party going after the city pulled the plug.
“I think we’re pretty onto something,” said Frederick “Pee Dee” Poole, who “by accident” turned his three-car garage in north Rochester into “Da Garage” – a club hosting about 1,200 revelers at its peak.
“The vibe was phenomenal. You wouldn’t believe the people who were showing up,” he boasted to The Post, claiming the parties in the “high crime” neighborhood” regularly drew 500 people.
Poole first started Da Garage around June 2020 after an afternoon birthday party kept rolling into a house party, and ever since has been playing a game of cat and mouse with the city – racking up nuisance complaints from officials and complying with orders to shut down, only to later ramp the parties back up following time off.
Da Garage fired up for a few blowouts this spring, but was finally hit by an order from Rochester Mayor Malik Evans himself, demanding a real “last call” when gunshots rang out down the street from a March party.
But Poole – who acknowledges that the club was being run completely without proper permitting – thinks the city’s perception of Da Garage is off, and that he’s been lumped in among troublemakers in the city throwing parties where sometimes fatal fights have erupted.
“No one got scratched over here, and this is really a high-crime area,” Poole said, acknowledging there were gunshots that March night but that they were completely unrelated to Da Garage. Gunfire and crime are par for the course in the neighborhood, he said.
“Some people got killed around the corner, actually, about three days ago,” he said. “I think they tried to compare us to that. And we’re not that.”
On the contrary, whenever Da Garage was bumping Poole said the neighborhood was safer than ever, as people who would otherwise be hanging around on street corners had a place to gather as a community.
“During the time that the garage was going on. There was zero crime in the area,” he said.
“This is a high volume, high crime volume area, and [Da Garage] was a nice house with security guards, and no one’s getting robbed. No one getting harassed, people got on their jewelry. You know?”
And though Poole sometimes charged entry fees, he also sometimes turned the parties into fundraisers – including one that raised about $9,000 for a mother without insurance whose son had died.
“The community respected it, the people respected it,” Poole said, noting that Da Garage wasn’t just a night club – by day he hosted free fitness classes, and on Sunday’s would host activities for neighborhood children.
“When you keep taking things away from people and away from the community, this is when you get the crowd standing around, in front of the corner store, this is when you get more chaos,” he said.
The city is now suing Poole, maintaining it simply cannot go on as it has.
“An establishment where people can gather, for entertainment, whatever that may be, that’s up to the owner. But there’s a legal way to do it, and Da Garage is not it,” the city of Rochester’s top lawyer, Corporation Counsel Patrick Beath, told WXXI News.
The mayor said, “When a location makes it up the chain to the Mayor’s Office, it’s a problem.”
Poole doesn’t think it’s likely Da Garage will be able to go on in his home as it has over the last four years, but is optimistic the city will hear him out on the community’s needs and work with him to start something nearby – with the proper permitting, of course.
“We would like for Da Garage to be a monumental place and Rochester, that’s our endgame goal,” he said.