His sentiment echoes that of Leena Monette, a Guilderland resident, Fuze Box patron and owner of an online fashion boutique. "I leveraged pretty much everything I had to make sure we could keep this for the community." "They came to me and said, 'This is our final offer. "But I also think fresh ideas and good energy are also important.
"It’s bittersweet when you sell a successful business," Famiano said. See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote. Over the past two years, the parties and their lawyers circled one another, with deals falling through, until the Fuze Box, which had been open less and less regularly in recent years, became a victim of the pandemic. "We have been extremely successful for the last 20 years," Famiano said via email, "starting as a martini lounge and evolving from poetry reading to hard core bands to goth and everything in between." "I never really thought about buying (Fuze Box) until I heard about them wanting to sell in 2019," Yager said. Multiple other businesses followed, including Lucky Cat, the first laundromat in the city to allow customers to pay via an app. He apprenticed at, then in 2006 bought, Patsy's, a longtime downtown barber shop.
More than a few have found out that he genuinely means this.Īfter a few years away from Albany in the beginning of this century, followed by what he describes as "living in the woods for a year or two" locally, lessons absorbed from business and motivational books including "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" began to take hold. When asked about the origin of "Tragedy," he promises to tell people, but only once they're too drunk to remember the story. "It was a fast, crazy path." His nickname predates that period. Punk rock is forever."įamiano and O'Toole fired him, but not merely because of differing business philosophies. "The spirit of that place was a punk club, and it always kept creeping back, no matter how much they tried to make it a swing bar. "They were trying to make that building something it wasn't," Yager said. Because that block of lower Central does not have odd and even addresses on opposite sides of the street, the Fuze Box became 12 Central Ave., to differentiate it from QE2's address. After QE2 closed, in 1999, the Fuze Box owners the following year moved it there, essentially across the street, into its own space, a decision Yager thought was ill conceived. With its own rear entrance, stylish atmosphere and staff dressed to reflect the resurgent interest in swing music at the time, the Fuze Box was a hit. "They essentially gave me carte blanche for the Fuze Box," Yager said. and Jimmie O'Toole, who also own the popular Oh Bar on Lark Street. Power Company was owned by the business partners Alfred J. It began life in late 1997 as a swanky cocktail bar in a back room of the Power Company, a since-closed dance club catering to the LGBT crowd. The firing seems odd, given that Yager founded the Fuze Box. "Those two places helped make me the man I am today," said Yager.ĭecades ago, Yager was banned from 13 Central Ave., when QE2 owner Charlene Shortsleeve found out he'd been underage for most of the years he'd been going there, and fired from the Fuze Box, the club that succeeded QE2 in a distinctive, former White Tower hamburger chain building. As with many people in the city's creative scene, like Yager now middle-aged or older, he hung out with the punk crowd at the hallowed music venue 288 Lark and, later, QE2, the legendary club that was open for 13 years at 13 Central Ave. His seems an unlikely success story, having started as a train-hopping teen runaway from the rural Greene County home of his youth who came of age in Lark Street's glory years of the 1980s. At 52 years old, 6-foot-2 and 245 pounds, with a long braided beard and tattoos from a dragon on his scalp to a portrait of his wife on his ankle, Yager cuts an imposing figure. If you haven't seen it, you may have seen him. He also fought in an amateur mixed-martial-arts bout at the Washington Avenue Armory and owns a pink hearse that he parks various places around the city.
Yager III, known almost universally by the nickname Tragedy, for reasons that won't be satisfactorily explained later, is the serial entrepreneur behind holdings that have grown into what he calls the Tragic Empire: Patsy’s Barber Shop, Modern Body Art, Shocker Tattoo Co., Lucky Cat Laundromat and Bull and Bee Meadery & Tasting Room, all in Albany.