DOWNTOWN SOUND Skinny and Blue Mango to return BY SAM PFEIFLE

For those of you who’ve been wondering what’s to become of the old bank/Whit’s End/Carter campaign building on Portland’s Congress Street, here’s the straight dope: Bill Umbel, whom you may know as Chair of the Bluegrass Music Association of Maine Board of Directors, bought the building about a year ago. Now, plans are in place to renovate the building and install the Blue Mango Cafe, which once resided on Middle Street, on the ground floor and the Skinny, the nightclub that used be the nightclub, on the second floor — assuming all of the city’s and state’s hoops and hurdles can be jumped through and over.

"Actually, I’m sitting here with my architect right now," says Umbel, when reached on his cell phone.

"I had wanted a music venue in Portland for quite a while, but I didn’t want to do it myself," he says when asked about how the Skinny became a possibility. "Then [Johnny Lomba] approached me one day about putting the Skinny back in there. If we can get through the city and the codes, then we’ll do it."

Umbel understands that there may be resistance from local merchants in the Downtown/Congress Street area of Portland, especially after the complaints the old Zootz once engendered, but he says he’s already purchased windows that were originally designed to reduce noise at airports, and that "This ain’t going to be Zootz. I’m not real permissive of what people can do on my property and I don’t like cops and I don’t like lawyers."

"He’s got a good reputation," Umbel says of Lomba and the way he ran the old Skinny nightclub just a few blocks up the street, "Not only for bringing in the good regional talent but also the good national talent."

Umbel says he’s meeting with the city this Thursday. If all goes well, he’s already got engineers and builders under contract, and it’s more than possible that the Skinny and Blue Mango could be open before the end of the year.