TELL US: What Should Go Here?

Anyone driving down Main Street or looping off Route 9 has to notice this big, abandoned building on what should be a prime piece of real estate, located across from and right near the Route 9 overpass.

The facade of the blue-grey building is decorated with what looks like enormous nuts and bolts from someone with a Flintstones fetish, and the exterior identifies it only as 'Sleep'.

But someone has a sense of humor: the marquee under one of the 'Sleep' signs says "No." It's hard to know if they mean "No Sleep" or if the closed up building will ever perform a useful function.

Longtime Woodbridge residents will remember that the Club Sleep site was once upon a time the home of a classic restaurant, the Brass Bucket. The steakhouse was owned by the Venezia family; in particular, Nick Venezia, a Woodbridge Democratic chairman and attorney who had his offices right on the other side of the Route 9 overpass from the restaurant. 

According to accounts in old newspapers, the Brass Bucket got its start at that site in 1957. Before that, the restaurant was an old gin mill called Sarge's Old Corral.

A man of Hungarian descent named Sarge Magyar, the paper relates, was a restauranteur from Perth Amboy who decided to open up a bar at the old structure somewhere around the early 1900s. Apparently, the original building on the site was a stable, used to house the horses and carts for the brick companies for which Woodbridge was famous. The workers would dig the clay out of the old clay pits at Mutton Hollow, an area of upper Main Street where much of and the surrounding condos and buildings are situated, and load it onto the carts for transportation to the brickworks.

The Brass Bucket closed somewhere in the 1990s. Somewhere after then, after one or two incarnations, two New York nightclub owners thought it'd be a perfect spot for a hot club in the Manhattan style.

The gimmick with 'Sleep' - or Club Sleep as it was referred to - was that patrons reclined in several rooms on enormous bedlike chairs. Partiers in the rear of the building, in areas almost like private dining rooms, could only buy alcohol by the bottle, which could run up to $400.

There were girls who were paid to dance, and others paid to sleep in enormous aquariums. Patrons would tap on the glass to see if they were real or mannequins.

The club also sported an enormous dance floor. 

'Sleep' opened in 2004 and closed the same year, after 300 partiers did the opposite of slumber and instead rioted outside the club following a concert after-party hosted by the hip-hop group, Mobb Deep. 

Since the club closed, the building has been vacant for almost 8 years.

So after hearing a bit about the history of that site, what do YOU think should go there? Another club? A restaurant like the Brass Bucket? Or do you have another idea? 

Post below and tell us what you think should go on this valuable piece of Woodbridge real estate. (And if you have any pictures of the Brass Bucket, email me at deborah.bell@patch.com. I'd love to post them.)