The new Freight will take its place, across the street from the Berkeley Repertory Theater in the culture gulch in downtown Berkeley, as a major arts institution, riding a rising tide of interest in acoustic music driven in part by the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival presented by financier and aficionado Warren Hellman, who also happens to be chairman of the Freight's fundraising campaign and a keystone donor himself.

"There's a much broader audience, not a mass-market audience, but a much broader audience than we've been getting at 1111 Addison," said Steve Baker, a former attorney who has been running the Freight since 1983. "We've sold out opening night and we're not changing the repertoire. We'll put it to a test starting Sept. 22."

The Freight is a remarkable success story. It began in 1968 as one of the last new folk clubs in a thriving Berkeley club scene that included coffeehouses and wine and beer joints popular with the college crowd, such as the Blind Lemon, the Cabal and the Jabberwock, all now long gone. The club opened on the San Pablo Avenue site of a vacant used-furniture store and kept the sign that read Freight & Salvage, adding only the word "nightclub." The club was the first Bay Area nightclub to ban smoking and did not serve booze, although drinks could be obtained across the street at the Albatross, where student activist Mario Savio worked as a bartender.

For years, the Freight ran a program that stayed safely out of the loud electric rock and blues fray that packed other local clubs, concentrating on the small but devoted folk music realm. Local performers such as the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, bluegrass specialists High Country, folksingers Reilly and Maloney, Malvina Reynolds ("Little Boxes"), Styx River Ferry, Mayne Smith and Mitch Greenhill and other Freight regulars filled the squares on the club's familiar monthly calendars. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead jammed with bluegrass musicians at the club. Cartoonist R. Crumb was another regular with his old-timey band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders. Old country blues greats like Bukka White, Mance Lipscomb or Mississippi Fred McDowell played the room.

Bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley recalled working the original place with a band that included Ricky Skaggs. "I remember playing in a room where folks were packed together sitting on the floor," he said.

Acoustic music

By the time the club relocated three blocks away to 1111 Addison St., where the audience sat at tables, the folk scene had retreated even further from the mainstream and the club subsisted on performers with slim but dedicated followings.

Alison Krauss played there when she was still in high school. Nickel Creek appeared at the club when its members were all still teens. Linda Ronstadt joined her old pals Carol McComb and Kathy Larisch a few years ago. Over the years, everybody in the acoustic music world has come to know Berkeley's Freight & Salvage and, although the club was famous for its hospitality, it could lack for something in creature comforts for performers. It was when he saw Odetta waiting in line to use the restroom between sets that Baker realized it was time for the Freight to move.

"That was the epiphany for me," he said. "I realized we didn't have the facilities for the performers we were booking. We were in escrow within a year."

The new club sits on a footprint of a former garage and the body shop next door. The facade remains, with the words "Stadium Garage" still etched under fresh paint in the concrete front. In addition to the 600-plus capacity auditorium (with more than 400 high-tech fixed seats), the new building houses an expansive lobby, future home of the Freight's cafe, and several rooms upstairs for workshops and teaching. The auditorium features sweeping sight lines and a huge acoustic space - ringed by the old wood from the original garage - with an exquisite sound system donated by world-famous Meyer Sound Laboratories of Berkeley. The seating rows feature generous legroom and footrests.

It also has two backstage bathrooms, both with showers.

Educational element

Like Club Passim in Cambridge, Mass., on the site of the historic Club 47, or Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, the Freight will now include an educational element in its programming. Performers can hold workshops on the afternoon of their performances, and regular music classes will be held in the upstairs room, much like Jazzschool across the street.

The Freight raised the huge budget through fewer than 3,000 donations, including several seven-figure gifts. "We do what we do pretty well and I'm proud of us," said Baker, "but there's a community that supports us. We're half community organization and half nightclub operation. And I'm trying to figure this out. To many people, we're the opera, the ballet and the symphony all rolled into one."

Baker first came to the Freight to attend a "Save the Freight" meeting when the club was at its original site. At the time, he was a lawyer with a private practice in Berkeley specializing in nonprofit clients. It took him eight years to complete the transition from his law practice to full-time nightclub management. He also plays guitar and occasionally sits in with the Freight performers. In 1988, he supervised the move to the old Addison Street address a block off San Pablo Avenue.

For any nightclub to withstand the stormy changes in the music scene over the past 40 years, not to mention the inevitable economic tides that would affect any business over that duration, is nothing short of a miracle, but the Freight stayed true to its original mission, and the club came to mean something to both the performers and clientele over the years. It came by the rustic, homey warmth of its new digs honestly.

After a preopening party for what Baker calls "the congregation," featuring entertainment by bands led by two of the chief fundraisers - Warren Hellman's the Wronglers and Freight board member Danny Carnahan's Wake the Dead - the Freight will roll out a gala opening weekend featuring an already sold-out fiddle summit; David Grisman; Ramblin' Jack Elliott; and a bluegrass blowout supervised by fiddler Laurie Lewis, a Berkeley High grad who has played probably a thousand shows at the Freight since she was a teen.

Also appearing at the private opening will be Phil Marsh of the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, who may - or may not - have played opening night 41 years ago. All these years later, nobody's quite sure exactly who did.

Freight rolls on

After the grand opening weekend, the Freight rolls on, relocated to one of the finest venues in the state, plopped in downtown Berkeley where the club won't be so easy to ignore, and expanded to extend its reach even deeper into the community.

The new club not only adds backstage bathrooms but also more than doubles the club's capacity.

"It's a major step up for us," said Baker. "When you see performers waiting in line to use the bathroom, you know it's time to go." {sbox}

Freight & Salvage grand opening weekend: Freight Fiddle Summit with Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, Liz Carroll, Darol Anger and the Monster String Quartet on Thurs. (sold out); David Grisman Quintet and Greg Liszt & the Deadly Gentlemen on Fri.; Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Rick DiDia and Aireene Espiritu on Sat.; Bluegrass Blow-Out with Laurie Lewis and the Right Gentlemen, Bluegrass Intentions, Kathy Kallick Band, High Country, Jim Nunally and Keith Little on Sun. Showtime 8 p.m. Tickets: $18.50 ($26.50 for David Grisman). Other events for the gala weekend include live broadcast of "West Coast Weekend" radio show at 10 a.m. Sat. and Community Open House noon to 5 p.m. Sat. (510) 548-7603, www.freightandsalvage.org.

E-mail Joel Selvin at pinkletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page Q - 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle