Gimmie a Bud, and Please Pass the Chanticleer

January, 2003

"Here we go again," a familiar male voice announced angrily from my answering machine speaker. "Have you seen the story in The Blade about them trying to keep gay bars from opening on 14th Street?!" I had not. So, after listening to the rest of my caller's complaint I powered up my computer and went directly to The Washington Blade web site.

Founded by gay activists in 1970 as a means to spread information and politically mobilize the then just beginning to emerge Washington, D.C. gay community, The Blade is now one of the nation's most respected newspapers serving that market. The story I found inside on page 8, more a note really, was brief its headline ominous. "Logan Circle ANC creates 'nightlife' task force," announced The Blade.

The cycle is familiar. For one reason or another, thriving inner city neighborhoods, sometimes even some of a city's most fashionable, begin to slide. Residents move away. Businesses close. Property values plummet. Conditions and quality of life become ever more grim until, years or decades later, young singles and couples--very often young gay or lesbian singles and couples--are drawn to the area by its convenience and the availability of inexpensive housing.

Word about affordable rents begins to spread and more urban pioneers arrive. Bars and restaurants targeted to the new residents begin to replace shot 'n' beer joints or open in new spaces. An existing community organization gets new life or a new group is formed, usually around quality of life issues. The new bars and restaurants become popular and begin to attract people into the neighborhood at night. Community theatres and art galleries spring up in once abandoned buildings. The neighborhood becomes trendy. Apartment rents increase. Retail and service businesses open. Wealthier individuals and more traditional families begin to buy and fix-up homes. Real estate values soar. The neighborhood sees its first new housing starts in decades.

Of course all this evolution takes place over a period of years during which people come and go until only a remaining few have first hand knowledge of how bad the area was in the not too distant past. One day a homeowner says to a neighbor, "This neighborhood would so nice if it wasn't for all the traffic, noise, and litter, and if it had fewer bars." The neighbor replies, "If we had fewer businesses selling alcohol, there wouldn't be any traffic, noise, or litter!"

Pretty soon alcohol-selling businesses become the topic of discussion at the community organization's meetings. The organization, usually at the urging of a few members with a mission, launches a campaign to close some bars and keep others from opening. The neighborhood group begins to engage in something that, if done by organized crime, would be called extortion. Business owners and those seeking alcoholic beverage licenses are told that if they want to avoid long and costly legal battles and possible financial ruin, they must agree to restrictions on hours of operation and other conditions that far exceed requirements mandated by local or state laws.

Under these conditions, if left unchallenged, it does not take too long before The Cock, the neighborhood's gay leather bar (a fictitious establishment created by me so this column could have a catchy headline), closes its doors and reopens a month later as Café Chanticleer, a "neighborhood oriented" restaurant. Chanticleer doesn't serve alcohol, attracts few patrons, generates no street traffic, trash, or noise, closes every night at 10 p.m., and undoubtedly will be out of business by year's end. A celebration is held at the next residents association meeting because at long last the neighborhood is nice again.

Not all that long ago, the area of northwest Washington between 10th and 17th streets, above Massachusetts Avenue but below U Street, was not the sort of place to venture out alone on foot at night. A victim of white flight and governmental indifference and ineptitude during the years since the 1968 race riots, the once elegant district of Federal- and Victorian-style homes, and small but stable neighborhood shopping districts, fell into disrepair and remained that way until the mid-1980s.

Today the western portion of that geography has a new name, Dupont East, and is one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods, with all the options and quality of life amenities one would expect. Its main thoroughfare, 17th Street, has for the past 15 years been the epicenter of Washington's gay nightlife. That is beginning to change as more and more businesses catering to gays and lesbians open three blocks east, on 14th Street.

The district's eastern end, the Logan Circle neighborhood, was slower to rebound but is catching up fast. Its seven-block-long commercial strip along 14th Street, between N Street and U Street, now boasts, among other things, a new upscale supermarket, a national chain pharmacy, a furniture store that specializes in European imports, a national chain coffee house, a Subway sandwich shop, a gay health club (love that term, so 21st century), and nine bars and restaurants, three of which--Playbill Café, Hamburger Mary's, and Titan--serve a largely gay clientele. Another gay venue is slated to open in 2003. Commercial and residential property values are sky high and climbing.

One might reasonably expect that such an inner city success story would have everyone involved grinning from ear to ear and patting each other on the back. But, as is too often the case in our nation's capital, logic doesn't have much to do with anything.

As mentioned earlier, the Logan Circle Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) has created a committee to study the effect bars and other alcohol-serving businesses along 14th Street have on the surrounding neighborhood. Studies such as the one planned have traditionally been the first salvo in what ultimately become major, ongoing offensives against food and beverage establishments under the guise of protecting quality of life in neighborhoods.

That such will again be the case is evidenced by a passage from the ANCs statement announcing the survey. "Issues like noise, parking, security, trash, and public drunkenness are all important questions that need to be addressed by the community and this survey is the first step in aggressively tackling the problem," said the ANC 2F commissioners. One does have to be awed by the simplicity--bars cause all problems; get rid of bars and, poof, there will be no problems.

ANCs were created through lobbying by community activists during the process leading up to Congress's approval almost 30 years ago of the District of Columbia Home Rule Charter. ANC commissioners are elected for two-year terms by residents who live and vote within the city's 37 ANC districts. Each commissioner represents a single member district consisting of about 2,000 registered voters who live within the ANC's boundaries. ANCs are powerful beyond their prominence because City agencies are charged by law with giving their views "great weight" during the debate of important issues, including alcoholic beverage licensing hearings.

As is almost always the case in these disputes, and this is not the first, Logan Circle ANC commissioners are on record as having said, "Bars and restaurants should be part of the neighborhood's commercial mix." The important but unanswered questions are, who will determine what that mix is, and is it alcohol-serving businesses, or businesses run by irresponsible persons, that create problems and are neighborhood nuisances?

Logan Circle ANC commissioners and leaders of the Logan Circle Community Association appear to think that, like their counterparts in Dupont East, their organizations have the mandate to decide how many and which establishments constitute the correct neighborhood "mix."

In Dupont East, the Dupont Circle Citizens Association (DCCA), which for years controlled the ANC that represents that neighborhood, successfully ushered in a liquor license moratorium during the 1990s that effectively prevents the opening or expansion of any alcohol-serving businesses on 17th Street. That moratorium is being eyed as the model for similar restrictions in other D.C. neighborhoods, including Logan Circle.

In both neighborhoods, though, there are those who take the position that while Dupont East and Logan Circle are neighborhoods with single-family homes and multi-unit residential properties, they are both also part of an urban, mixed-use, inner-city environment. These residents would rather let the market decide which businesses will succeed and which will not, and let problems like public drunkenness, excessive noise, and illegal parking be handled by police as crimes, rather than by other agencies as alcoholic beverage control issues.

In 2000, after gay bar and restaurant owners rolled (bent?) over before DCCA and Dupont Circle ANC demands year-after-year for a quarter of a century, one popular 17th Street gay bar owner and some of his patrons fought back. The ensuing legal battle and 10-month-long public education campaign waged in the media and online resulted not only in a tactical defeat for the community group, but also in the election of new and much more business-friendly ANC members.

The liquor license moratorium on 17th Street remains in effect. However the successful campaign to educate residents and gay business about the anti-gay motivations of some community group leaders created an environment that helped facilitate formation of the Committee for a Living City. The committee organizes licensed alcoholic beverage serving establishments and represents their interests through public relations and lobbying efforts.

Not all Logan Circle ANC commissioners support the conduct of the alcoholic beverage survey as currently planned. James W. Brandon, an openly gay, long-time Logan Circle ANC commissioner, said he is concerned that because the survey will be distributed by mail to one-third of all registered voters living within the ANC's boundaries, it will not realistically reflect the views of the community.

Although a gay man who does frequent bars, at least during the traditional after-work Happy Hours, Brandon has on occasion voted to deny license renewals to the owners of alcoholic beverage businesses that have been proven to cause problems in the neighborhood. He said his goal is to do what he can to ensure that the survey is supervised by people who represent all sides of the issue, and that those surveyed really do represent a proportional cross section of the community.

George Sumner shares Brandon's concern. Sumner, a 24-year-old graduate student who moved to Washington and Logan Circle in late November, said he has not yet registered to vote. "There's no reason for me to register now, the next election isn't for two years," Sumner said.

Sumner too thinks a direct mail survey will result in a skewed response. "They're going to miss everyone who goes to bars," said Sumner. "People will fall below the radar because of the registered voter requirement, or they're going to think [the survey is] junk mail and throw it away."

After speaking with LCCA survey task force chair Tim Hillard and task force member and ANC 2F commissioner-elect Cary Silverman about the survey, I think there may be a dramatic difference between the community group mindset in Logan Circle and that in Dupont East. Hillard and Silverman both seem to be rational, intelligent men. They also seem to have the shared goal of conducting a fair and broad based survey. Time will tell.

For the present, and with high hopes, I will not agree with my irate caller that, "here we go again." Instead, I say all things are possible between people of good will.

Michael Romanello is a journalist from Washington, D.C. He is a former editor of The Observer, a Pittsburgh, Pa., news weekly, and of Telecommunications Reports International, a Washington-based telecommunications industry publication. His column and investigative reports appear here, in Washington's The InTowner(R) newspaper, and elsewhere. He lives in the Logan Circle neighborhood.