Earl "Skully" Webb built his Columbus institution the hard way, moving it twice before it stuck. He opened the first Skully's as an underground bar and grill on the Ohio State campus in 1994, a literal basement dive reached by stairs from the sidewalk, then ran a short-lived restaurant incarnation in Clintonville. When Campus Partners began buying up and demolishing properties near the university in the late 1990s, Webb took a relocation payout and went looking for a permanent home. He found it at 1151 North High Street, opening Skully's Music-Diner there in November 2001 in a Short North space that had previously housed other nightspots. The new venue was a far larger and more ambitious proposition: a multi-level room with several bars, patios, a balcony, a dance floor and a stage, and for years a working kitchen, all built around live music and DJ nights seven nights a week. Over two decades the venue became a central pillar of the Columbus scene, booking indie rock, hip-hop, punk, metal and dance acts on the way up and filling the gap left when other mid-sized rooms closed. Its long-running Thursday "Ladies 80s" dance party became a local fixture in its own right, and the club collected awards for its DJ nights and its standing as a mid-sized venue. The kitchen that gave the "Diner" its name closed during the pandemic in 2020 and did not reopen, but the bar and music venue carried on. Built for a crowd of a few hundred, Skully's remains one of the longest-surviving rooms of its kind in the city, run by Webb and his wife Michele and still trading on a throwback rock-and-roll atmosphere and a packed, eclectic calendar. The current room runs to about 6,000 square feet and over the years has hosted acts on the rise, from blues-rockers the Black Keys to indie band Tokyo Police Club, alongside hip-hop, reggae and electronic nights. The relocation that made it possible came with a payout of around 172,000 dollars from Campus Partners, money that bankrolled the move to High Street. The venue leaned into its diner identity too, collecting a tongue-in-cheek 2015 nod as the best diner in America from a travel blog, a reminder of the kitchen that once anchored the operation before the pandemic closed it. From a basement pool hall, Skully's grew into one of the most decorated mid-sized rooms in Columbus.

Type: NightClub

Address: 1151 North High Street, Columbus, OH, United States, 43201

Telephone: 614-291-8856

Website: https://skullys.org

Opening Date: 01/11/2001