David Nadel arrived in Berkeley from Los Angeles to attend UC Berkeley, and somewhere between classes and activism, he formed a dance troupe. The troupe rented rehearsal spaces along San Pablo Avenue, the long commercial artery that runs through the East Bay flatlands. Renting was never going to be enough. In 1973, Nadel and six partners pooled their money and bought one of those buildings outright. The original structure was a string of old retail storefronts -- nothing glamorous, nothing designed for performance. Nadel and his friends built the wooden facade by hand, stitched the shops into a single hall, and opened Ashkenaz as a place where music meant movement. The philosophy was simple and radical for a music venue: the audience was not there to sit and watch. They were there to dance.

Between sets on a Thursday night, Nadel ejected a patron named Juan Rivera Perez from the club. It was the kind of confrontation that happens at music venues -- a judgment call made in the moment by the person responsible for everyone's safety. Perez left. Then he came back. During the second set, he shot Nadel point-blank in the head. Nadel died from the wound at the hospital. Perez was never found. The man who had built Ashkenaz with his own hands, who had lived in the apartment above the dance floor, was gone. He was an activist, a performance artist, a person who believed that dancing together was a form of civic life. His murder could have ended everything he built.

It did not end. In the wake of the shooting, a group of Ashkenaz regulars -- the people who had danced there for years, who knew the bartenders by name and the Tuesday night lineup by heart -- stepped forward and bought the venue. They reorganized it as a nonprofit, the Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center. Six months after Nadel's death, on June 21, 1997, the doors reopened. The space upstairs where Nadel had lived became office space. His living room became a conference room. But the dance floor stayed exactly as he had built it, and the calendar kept filling with the same eclectic mix of global sounds that had always defined the place. What changed was the governance: Ashkenaz now belonged to its community in a legal sense, not just a spiritual one.

The nonprofit model freed Ashkenaz to pursue values that a profit-driven venue would struggle to justify. The organization committed to becoming a zero-waste business -- everything is recycled, and customers receive glasses of water instead of plastic bottles. A television program on Berkeley Community Television called Ashkenaz Live showcases performances and the histories behind the musical traditions on stage. On Sunday mornings, the hall that hosted a late-night dance party the evening before fills with children, as local musicians play live sets for young audiences. The cafe serves beer, wine, and vegetarian food. There is a stage and a separate dance studio for classes. None of it would exist without the tragedy that nearly destroyed it, and none of it feels tragic. It feels, instead, like exactly the kind of stubborn, idealistic, slightly impractical institution that Berkeley has always been good at sustaining.