Neighborhood Threat

To appease neighbors, the club has installed double doors to prevent noise from reaching the street. They have also tapped employees to sweep the sidewalk in front of the venue and answer the phone during the day to take complaints from neighbors.

…say the new owners of Studio B to the Brooklyn Paper.

I’ll be giving this a try soon.

I stole the title of this post from an anonymous commenter from this Gothamist post on the Production Lounge.  Now it’s going to be demonizing the neighborhood as some kind of racist cesspool, instead of stepping up and saying, “We want to be good neighbors. We are as horrified at the shooting as you are. We want to work with you and we want to stay in Greenpoint. We will make changes and you will see that we can be good neighbors and that nothing like this will ever happen again.”

Why can’t he just say that? Just say that. That isn’t admitting to anything. It’s just saying what needs to be said.

Studio B pulled the same crap on us when we were fighting them. A neighbor came up with a list of demands, all of which were standard items that any club should be doing (double doors, smoking pen, etc.) and they acted like the neighbor had invented these things on the spot and that they would certainly do them and oh thank you for telling us. Why didn’t they just DO THEM, say they were done, and then get on with it?

Now he has assured that he will have no sympathy from the neighborhood, and the goodwill of some Park Slope hipsters who believe everything they read on Gothamist is not going to help him stay open.

And yes, apparently Studio B has been able to rise from the dead. They will be good neighbors, they will follow rules and policies, or we will call 311 and the 94th six times a night with every complaint we see.

I had a class this evening so I didn’t arrive until close to 8pm, but any worries that I might have missed the festivities were assuaged immediately. It was standing room only, OG residents and hipster newcomers, everyone concerned about one thing: the 2/14 shooting incident at the Production Lounge, and the bar in general, as it’s been widely regarded in the neighborhood as troublesome from day 1.

I felt sorry for the Detective Inspector, as he patiently attempted to give calm answers to what was, essentially, the same question asked in 60 different ways. I don’t blame anyone - I know what it was like when we were fighting Studio B and no one cared except the handful of us right in the area - but at some point you have to realize that the police are not going to tell you exactly what they are going to do to deal with the bar because then the troublemakers are just going to do the opposite.
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Here’s to the power of citizen journalism: our neighbor to the south at INSIJS (great blog, horrible name) did an unbelievable job running down the reality of those ‘no parking’ signs posted by contractors and construction sites on his blog here.

Now, I’m not sure I would always disregard these signs (as some of the commenters mention, there is the chance of retaliation), but if I got home late one night and the only space was here, I’d take my chances, knowing that there is no chance of a monetary penalty from the city.

El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

I know, we probably didn’t have a lot to do with this. I am sure they would have gotten into trouble eventually with or without the community holding them responsible.

But it sure feels good.

Latest From Kent Avenue

Lest you feel this is anything new, these are the same people who would throw stones at an ambulance going lights and sirens to the hospital on Yom Kippur in Israel, if that ambulance went down the wrong street. (Nevermind that Jewish law specifically states that to save even a single soul it is permissible to break the Sabbath or most commandments.)

They’re my people but this is making me want to bike up and down the Southside on a Saturday.

And they’re worse than ever. Last night’s grand reopening party made noise that kept me awake from just after 1am until 5:15 THIS MORNING. The trucks that drive up Franklin at that hour were quieter.

1. The music was louder. I know because I could hear it clearly from the building. It wasn’t just a dull thump. So they’ve done nothing to ameliorate it. There is no double door. And I bet they had a dj on the roof, despite insisting that they don’t.
2. The people were stupider. Someone drover around the block SIX TIMES IN A ROW blasting that horrific Haddaway song. They yelled more, they yelled louder, they yelled later. People were yelling at 3:15, 4:30, 5:15. (Linda, I hope you finally caught up with your friends.)
3. The horn blowing was insane, and it wasn’t cabs. It was people waiting for their friends. I think that some of these people actually worked at the club, based on the tenor of the conversation. “Hey, it’s 3 in the morning, and I want my friends to hurry up. Let me keep blowing my horn, alternating with yelling. I mean, I don’t have to go to work tomorrow so no one else does. There are no families with children or babies in this area, what difference does it make if I make noise?”
4. Nothing actually started to be noisy until about 1am, which explains why I didn’t go outside and try to see what was going on. Because I’m one of those people who had to work today. I also did not file a complaint with 311 for that reason. I am a bad neighbor.

Basically, they didn’t learn anything. It’s business as usual. They never had any intention of being a good neighbor until they got busted, and now that they are back in business (although no one is sure how, given that none of the statues of their permits have changed), they’re just going to continue to be the blatantly inconsiderate assholes about running their club that they always have been.

I cannot wait for their liquor license to come up for renewal. And I will never again not phone a complaint into 311, no matter how late it is.

Can anyone recommend a good white noise machine?

Since other blogs have been writing off the Studio B situation as irrelevant, let me outline here what you need to do to fight this club, in my humble opinion:

1. Call 311 each and every single time there is a problem. Every time. Every night. Do not let them tell you that someone else just called in the same complaint or that there are already too many complaints. You are well within your rights to insist that they take your complaint.
2. If 311 gives you numbers of other city agencies to call your complaints into during business hours, take down the numbers and DO IT.
3. Call the non-emergency line of the 94th Precinct every time you call 311 and give your complaint to them too.
4. Of course it goes without saying that IF YOU HEAR GUNFIRE, CALL 911. DO NOT OPEN YOUR WINDOWS AND LOOK OUTSIDE! CALL 911! This is not an episode of “Cops”.
5. Keep a log of everything that happens. Dates, times, incident descriptions.
6. Contact CB1 and find out when the next Public Safety committee meeting is. Bring your log to the meeting with copies for the committee.
7. Write letters to the mainstream media: that means the local newspapers. They all have neighborhood reporters of some type.
8. Contact every blog in the city with information about what is going on at Club Exit and what it is like to live near them.
9. Join the CB1 email list and follow what’s going on in the neighborhood and see if you can find venues for bringing your story to or if there are committees you can join to help remedy the problems or bring them to the attention of additional city agencies.
10. Organize your neighbors. Leaflet the neighborhood. Start a petition. Get people together so that everyone is doing all of the things on this list as often as possible.

There. That’s what I would do if I lived near Club Exit. But I don’t, so I don’t know what’s going on except what I read - which, given the problems I hear about the club, should be a lot more than I do.

It is not my job to fight the Club Exit fight. But at least I’m offering tangible suggestions about what should be done.

We left for vacation at 4:30am on Friday morning following the Community Board hearing, so I have not been able to chime in on the discussion until now.

I walked into that meeting feeling as though nothing we would do or say would have any impact, beyond making me feel better that I participated in the process instead of just sitting in my apartment seething. Since the club has continually ignored every single law they wanted to, I felt that nothing we did or said would make any difference. They hired an attorney at $550 an hour (at least) who walked in glad-handing the police captain and trying to take over the meeting and basically telling the committee that they had better approve the application or else, well, it might get approved anyway.

I didn’t want to be at this meeting. I had worked an insane week already, I needed to pack and finish getting ready, we had a very early flight out the next morning. We looked at everything that had happened and that we had done already and thought, we should just let someone else pick up the fight. Luckily, however, Studio B continued with their stupid quotes in the media and it irritated us to the point that we realized that we had no choice but to see it through. We canceled our Thursday evening plans (which had significant meaning to us), spent the weekend packing and running around with last minute errands, and cleared our calendars so we could attend. The only thing I didn’t have time to do was leaflet the neighborhood to encourage people to attend. My leaflet would have made the same points that Susan’s letter did, that we wanted the club to step up and be a good neighbor.

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“Agnes Piekarska, Studio B’s general manager and a 16-year Greenpointer, says that the venue works to keep customers from disturbing the neighbors. She notes that bouncers shoo patrons off area stoops and steer departing clubgoers away from nearby residential streets. She also maintains that the club has received few complaints from Greenpoint residents.”

If you did that, WE WOULDN’T HAVE ANY PROBLEMS. I can see the corner from my window. No one, repeat, no one, has ever moved anyone from the corner EXCEPT US GOING OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOING SO. I watch stupid white boys peeing on the steps of Budd Woodworking, where people eat lunch every day, in full view of the bouncers, and no one has ever said anything - except us.

Assholes.