AN OPEN LETTER TO EAST VILLAGE RESIDENTS

 

Friends and neighbors,

 

The state is pushing liquor licenses again to raise revenue in the recession. Problem is, once bars have replaced all the businesses that serve the local community, the bars don't leave when the recession is over. CB3's licensing committee will be held Monday, March 15, 6:30pm, 200 East 5th St @ the Bowery/3rd Ave. Bill Koehnlein is drawing together resistance. See below:

 

Rob Hollander, ph.d.

LES blog:

linguistics blog:

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Bill Koehnlein

Date: Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 2:39 PM

Subject: East Village: more liquor licenses, lower Second Avenue area

 

Hi-

 

This is for people who live near Second Avenue in the East Village. For

those of you outside the neighborhood, apologies for this email (although

your community might be plagued with the same problems as mine and you might want be interested in what's going on here).

 

At any rate, please forward this to people who might be interested.

 

The SLA and DCA Licensing Committee of Community Board #3 meets on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 6:30 pm at the JASA/Green Residence (200 East Fifth Street at Third Avenue) to look at various new and renewal liquor license applications in our immediate vicinity. Please attend this meeting to press the committee to reject these applications. We do not need one more bar around here.

 

(A good talking point: after the Mercury Dime closed down--this was the cafe in the tiny building on Fifth Street, right next to Sin Sin bar; Mercury's liquor license was successfully challenged by the community—a new business opened. Not a bar, not a restaurant, but a barber shop! An old-fashioned barber shop--and it seems to be doing a decent business, putting to rest the bar owners' assertions that only liquor-serving businesses can make it in the neighborhood.)

 

Liquor license applications on lower Second Avenue include a license transfer application for 93 Art LLC at 93 Second Avenue (between Fifth and Sixth Streets). This is the obnoxious bar known as Lit Lounge. It's essential that community members loudly protest and oppose this license transfer. Note that Lit Lounge was recently cited by the NYC Department of Health for allowing indoor smoking and DOH has begun the legal procedures to shut Lit down. The transfer application is simply a back door way of allowing this establishment to remain open. Let's make sure this place gets shut and stays shut.

 

Other applications include Heart of India (Triangle Four), 79 Second Avenue (formerly Madras Cafe), for a license transfer; and La Da Nang (Lee Cuisine Inc), 75 Second Avenue (site of the former Sea restaurant, which had a complaint history), for a new liquor license. Both locations are on the west side of Second, between Fourth and Fifth Streets. Tenzin and Tenzin Corp are applying for a new license for 306 East 6 Street, just off Second Avenue. The usual arguments in favor of license denial apply to all of these establishments: we are already saturated with bars in this area, despite the 500-foot rule, etc. etc.

 

Another CB3 meeting, possibly of interest, is its Economic Development

Committee, meeting on Tuesday, March 2 at 6:30 pm at the CB3 office at 59 East Fourth Street (between Second and Third). The important issue of retail diversity will be discussed. For those who were at the recent Nightlife Town Hall meeting with local pols and SLA honchos you might

remember that this issue was raised by several speakers during the meeting.

 

The issue of retail diversity brings up additional talking points vis a vis bar proliferation. Bar owners claim that bars and clubs bring money

and jobs into neighborhoods. But so do bodegas, florists, stationery

stores, boutiques, bookshops, laundries and dry cleaners....and barber

shops. Unlike bars, such businesses do not impact negatively on neighborhood quality of life or on local neighborhood economy (in this community, like many others, bars have been a major factor in gentrification, real estate speculation and massive rent increases, and displacement of long-time tenants). In awarding liquor license after liquor license after liquor license the SLA has always made the claim that such awards somehow are "in the public interest". They are not, of course. They are in the *economic* interests of private entities and individuals and the SLA must be told, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, until the message sinks in, that these liquor licenses do *not* serve any public interest at all--especially not in communities which have become saturated with bars. The SLA must be made to understand that there are factors beyond economic ones that must be considered when looking at liquor license applications, and it must be further made to understand that the "public interest" demands business diversity featuring enterprises that serve the needs of neighborhood residents, and not the whims and pleasures of suburbanites who come here to do what they would never do in their own communities. Business diversity brings neighborhood economic viability; bar proliferation does not.

 

The demand that the Ninth Precinct resurrect its cabaret unit is an essential one, and while that is not within the purview of CB3's SLA committee CB3 members need to hear it nonetheless.

 

It might be fruitful for neighborhood groups and block associations to compile an inventory of restaurants and cafes that do *not* serve alcohol but are successful and have remained in business for long periods. Would-be restaurateurs chant the same stale mantra over and over: they

can't make it in business unless they're permitted to sell liquor. On

Fifth Street, we have Podunk, a long-running tea shop that does not serve alcohol. On Second Avenue there is Atlas Cafe, Moonstruck and Veselka--these come instantly to mind, but there are surely others. Angelica Kitchen on 12 Street is wildly successful--has anyone ever gotten

a table without a long wait? (Angelica has a permit allowing patrons to bring their own wine.) The many little cafes that dot the neighborhood do not sell alcohol, yet they seem successful. Clearly, the argument that "liquor is necessary" is in the interest of the New York Night Life Association and its various members but it is a false assumption that does not hold up to real scrutiny.

 

Finally, attendees of the Nightlife Town Hall might recall that bar owners tried to cleverly re-focus the discussion from bar proliferation to the irrelevant notion of "good operators vs. bad operators", "good apples vs. bad apples". They deliberately obfuscate the real issue, of course: there are simply too many apples. That's the fact that the SLA and CB3 needs to fully understand. Here's hoping that as many East Villagers as possible will turn out for the March 15 Community Board 3 meeting. [sic]

 

--Bill Koehnlein