No Alternative Left : Entertainment: North Park nightspot, Drowsy Maggie’s, a stronghold for offbeat music, has closed. It may reopen at a new locale.

For a decade, Drowsy Maggie’s was a mecca for music. Patrons who went to the small, alcohol-free nightclub and restaurant on University Avenue in North Park could hear jazz guitarist Peter Sprague, blues singer Laura Preble or a flamenco musician known simply as Rodrigo.

But Drowsy Maggie’s is no more.

The popular club closed its doors Monday night. Though it may reappear by the middle of the summer in new quarters and under new ownership in the Gaslamp Quarter downtown, it is gone for good in North Park, according to owner Marcus Robbins.

“There are things going on in North Park, but they’re very individual,” Robbins said Thursday, as he cleaned out the place for the last time. “North Park needs every bit of culture it can get its hands on.

“It has problems with drugs and crime, and the night life that might have come with the reopening of the North Park Theatre never came, because the theater never reopened.”

Robbins said he had to close the club for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of exhaustion from 10 years of running a business by himself.

He said he intends to sell the rights to the name, recipes and equipment of Drowsy Maggie’s--and, indeed, has accepted a deposit for such a transfer--but that problems with the building prevent him or a new owner from keeping it in North Park.

Robbins opened Drowsy Maggie’s, at 3089 University Avenue, on June 1, 1981, and until 1986, his rent was $1,000 a month. It then increased to $1,400 a month and was scheduled to jump to $3,500 a month May 1.

“Starting over in a new location is very risky for any business, especially a nightclub with a set clientele,” Robbins said. But that’s what the new owners of Drowsy Maggie’s plan to do.

The husband-wife team of Bjorn Rafto and Mary Ellen Harshberger, who are buying the club from Robbins, said they had hoped to remain in North Park but “couldn’t work things out with the landlord,” so they will reopen the club in the Gaslamp Quarter.

“This neighborhood has been somewhat in decline,” Rafto said of the existing location. “We went round and round with the landlord, but couldn’t get it done, although there is some value to having it right where it is. But his bottom line was equivalent to the rents we were hearing about in the Gaslamp Quarter, so we’ve decided to go there. That’s a very exciting area. There’s a lot happening down there, with the Convention Center and all.”

Karen Metzger, who co-owns and manages the property with her husband, Reinhold, said Thursday that they were sorry to see Drowsy Maggie’s leave the neighborhood where it’s been a fixture in the San Diego music scene. She said that, despite the slump in North Park, Robbins’ monthly rent of $1,000 to $1,400 “was well below the market value for that kind of commercial property.”

She said she and her husband were willing to settle on a rent of $1,400 to $3,500, with a new owner, but blamed the club’s demise on Robbins’ lack of interest.

“He really wanted out of the business,” she said.

She said she has no idea what type of place will end up replacing the club.

Laura Preble, a local singer and songwriter, said Drowsy Maggie’s had been valuable, not only as a North Park nightspot, but also as “a venue for a lot of alternative acts” showcasing original music.

“There’s not a lot of places in San Diego where you can play original work,” Preble said. “Club owners don’t want to take a chance on having it. They want something that’s definitely going to draw. Most of them want Top 40, something that will bring in a big audience.

“Drowsy Maggie’s wanted quality music . . . alternative music. And the atmosphere was really nice. It was one of the first places that Peter (Calderwood) and I played (as members of the group Small Change), and I really liked it there.”

Since the closing of the Old Time Cafe in Leucadia in 1988, the reduction of folk music on KPBS-FM and now the departure of Drowsy Maggie’s, alternate music is hard to come by locally, Robbins said.

Preble said the Pannikin coffee emporium, next to the Book Works bookstore in Del Mar, offers a similar setting, but unlike Drowsy Maggie’s--a seven-day-a-week operation--it provides music one or two nights a week.

Robbins, 37, who had worked previously as an auto mechanic, said he conceived Drowsy Maggie’s as a European-style coffee house and nightclub, long on espresso, pecan pie and bluesy ballads. It also doubled as a restaurant, dishing up beef mulligan stew, pasta primavera and lasagna.

He said some of the high moments for him were appearances by the Electrocarpathians, specializing in Eastern European folk music, and Flamenco Fantastico, a family of musicians featuring Remedios Flores and her husband, Rodrigo, who once played as a soloist in Carnegie Hall.

Robbins said he was sad that the patriarch of the Electrocarpathians, who supports a family of six with his music, now has one fewer venue in which to pursue his livelihood. Robbins said he never paid performers a salary, but they often made as much as $200 a night in tips.

Now, Robbins plans to give way to Rafto, who said Thursday, “We won’t be around for a while, but Drowsy Maggie’s will re-emerge. Not here, of course, but when we do surface, it will be good. You can count on that.”