Weirs tries to re-create block party success with 'Wake the Lake'

LACONIA — Last September, nightclub owner Anthony Santagate saw his idea to extend Weirs Beach’s fairly short season come to life. “Biketemberfest” was a three-day block party on Lakeside Avenue, and was such a success that he’s going to attempt to repeat the success in May.

“Wake the Lake” will take place May 10, 11 and 12, and will feature three days of live bands and DJs, performing on three stages. Like “Biketemberfest,” Santagate has secured permission from the city to close off a block of Lakeside Avenue for “Wake the Lake,” and has the state Liquor Commission’s blessing for outdoor bars and for people within the closed-off area to drink on the street.

This won’t be the first Wake the Lake – Santagate has hosted season-starting events at the Tower Hill Tavern – but it will be the first of its scale.

“It never really grew to more than a couple hundred people, now I’m going to try to have a few thousand,” Santagate said.

Wake the Lake will feature live outdoor music from 5 to 11 p.m. on Friday, May 10; noon to 11 p.m. on Saturday; and on Sunday, a lineup of reggae bands will play from noon to 5 p.m. There will be no cover charge to attend, and Santagate expects the event to draw a mix of Bike Week types as well as younger people who come to Weirs Beach nightclubs for music and dancing.

It costs about $15,000 to put on such an event, which Santagate is paying for through sponsorships from local businesses as well as major corporations. Expenses include police details, private security, insurance, sanitation and marketing. But, if the weather’s good, the investment is worthwhile. Santagate estimated that 10,000 people attended Biketemberfest.

If Wake the Lake sees a similar turnout, it would be a boon to the bars and nightclubs whose storefronts are within the block party: Tower Hill Tavern, Crazy Gringo, Surfside Burger Bar, Compass Cafe and the former Paradise Beach Club, which Santagate purchased this winter and is converting into The Big House, a music and dance club.

Drawing big crowds in late September and early May would also prove a point. Santagate thinks it’s time to retire the conventional wisdom about The Weirs, which is normally thought to be a profitable area only between Memorial Day and Labor Day. He wants to be able to give people a reason to visit Weirs Beach outside of the summer months.

“We have only a short season to make money, we have to try to make money how we can,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with the city and state letting us have a little leeway, letting us try new things.”

Santagate said that he sees a different possibility for The Weirs, one where people come year-round for entertainment, in the same way that Meredith has remade itself as a destination for dining and boutique shopping.

“I believe that it’s going to go that way. It’s on the lake, it has to upscale eventually,” he said.

Santagate has become one of Weirs Beach’s more prominent entrepreneurs, but not that long ago he was a businessman on the smallest of scales. For many years he sold temporary tattoos from a tent on the boardwalk, until, around the turn of the century, the owner of the building at the corner of Tower Street and Lakeside Avenue asked him if he would run the small pizza shop. Nine years later, the rest of the building, which had housed a gift shop, became available, and Santagate sought permission from the city to put in a bar. Once that was granted, he took out a mortgage and a small business loan to purchase the property and start Tower Hill Tavern, which he has grown into a bar and restaurant with a second-floor music venue. Now he owns another Weirs Beach nightclub, the former Paradise Beach Club, which has a capacity for 400 people indoors and another 350 in an outdoor bar. He plans to host “national acts” during the week and to operate it as a dance club on the weekends.

With other development occurring in Weirs Beach, such as East Coast Flightcraft’s renovation of the Winnipesaukee Pier, Santagate thinks the time is right to invest.

“There is a lot of opportunity, especially for a street kid like me,” he said.

Bruce Cheney, the city councilor who represents The Weirs, praised Santagate’s entrepreneurialsim.

“Any efforts they make to improve their business and thereby improve the city’s position seems commendable to me,” Cheney said. He couldn’t say if The Weirs would be the next Meredith, but added, “Certainly, any effort to drive us in that direction seems a good idea to me. The Weirs in particular, Laconia in general has a lot to offer if we just start making the right decisions about growth… I do appreciate fellows like him who are trying to grow a business in Laconia, Lord knows the city needs commercial property as well as residential.”

As a former police chief, Cheney said he has reservations any time there are events including crowds and alcohol, and that he hopes event organizers work with police to keep everyone safe. “I think they tried hard last year to not let it get out of hand.”

Santagate isn’t the only one with an eye on The Weirs, said Karmen Gifford, president of the Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce.

“I think there’s a lot of changes that have happened and are continuing to happen. We’ve had calls from developers out of the area, they see it as an opportunity, I see it as an opportunity for year-round (business),” she said. The region has been slowly converting from a place of seasonal visitation to one of year-round residency, so there are more potential customers living in The Weirs in the off-season. And, she said, “It’s still iconic.”