Femme Fatale - photo by Eva Rinaldi

“The SLA will not tolerate violent bars that break the law,” the SLA said in its statement regarding the club’s liquor suspension. “This should serve as a message that this agency will not hesitate to take immediate action when licensees pose a threat to public health and safety.”

After the assault, which resulted in filed lawsuits by two of the clubs female patients as well as by NBA star Tony Parker, the SLA proceeded to stamp 17 Alcoholic Beverage Control violations against the club. They also cited ten total physicals assaults inside the club between March 11 and June 12.

This doesn’t mean that W.i.P./Greenhouse is completely in the dumps just yet.

According to the New York Observer, the club will reopen on July 8 after, as confirmed by one of the club’s spokespeople, reach an agreement “in principle” to open in coming week.

One can only assume a club that doesn’t sell liquor won’t be servicing many patrons. And even if the Drake/Chris Brown shenanigan attracts attention and customers, what will they be selling?

If you still plan on going to the club when it opens, Google Maps says club Shelter, on 34 Vandam St. is only 262 feet away from 150 Varick St. Also, City Winery is in between the two… but we’re not hinting at anything.

–Nick Gallinelli

Last Friday, police shut down the restaurant, which has been the subject of many neighborhood complaints for hosting loud, boisterous crowds late into the night in a largely residential area, for selling alcohol to minors. But the manager of Papasito and employees of other restaurants rallied at police headquarters to proclaim against the methods and timing of that shutdown, which they called unnecessary, unfair and excessive.
Fernando Mateo, a spokesperson for the Northern Manhattan Restaurant and Lounge Association who has defended Papasito at community board meetings, was the event’s main speaker.
“We want to save our businesses from the monster here behind me,” he said, shouting into a megaphone that nearby officers warily allowed him to use and indicating the offices of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. “‘Padlock Kelly’ has made sure that our businesses get padlocked and that all of you are unemployed, simply because there’s very little communication.”
Manuel Melchor, a manager at Papasito who was working when the cops closed the restaurant down on Friday, said he wants the NYPD to inform him when one of his staff members illegally serves alcohol to a minor, issuing a violation on the spot so he can properly deal with the infraction instead of waiting for a surprise raid.
Melchor said that he has capitulated to local demands like cutting down on music and closing at 2 a.m. instead of 4 a.m.  “Last week, the police come in, like 15 people—15 officers in uniforms and jackets.”
The police ordered the kitchen closed in the middle of the dinner service, escorted everyone out of the restaurant and closed it down. Melchor said that since it happened on a Friday and they could not get to court until Monday, the restaurant lost a weekend’s worth of revenue and staff lost valuable shifts. The NYPD did not respond to questions for this article.
State Sen. Eric Adams, who represents a district in Brooklyn, also spoke at the rally, emphasizing what he says are the differences in how businesses are treated in different parts of the city. He claimed the NYPD would never padlock a downtown hotspot.
“If you don’t do it on Park Avenue, you shouldn’t do it on Park Avenue in the Bronx. If you don’t do it in Midtown, you shouldn’t do it in Washington Heights,” Adams said.
The State Liquor Authority (SLA) confirmed that they are currently considering how to handle three separate violations of the Alcoholic Beverage Control law that occurred at Papasito late last year, and that they warned the establishment in January of this year about maintaining a “disorderly premises” and being a “focal point for police.” Last year, Papasito paid $2,500 in civil penalties to the SLA for unlicensed use of their sidewalk space and improper naming conventions, but spokesperson William Crowley said that those are relatively minor offenses.
Crowley said that the infractions involving serving alcohol to minors will be looked at on a case-by-case basis, and that while that type of violation could be enough to warrant a suspension or revocation of a liquor license, the SLA will consider all the circumstances before making that decision.
“There’s a difference between going to a place where it’s 50 percent minors,” and those that regularly check ID and may have been tricked by particularly good fakes or by kids using an older sibling’s real ID, Crowley said.
Community Board 7 will hold a public hearing on Papasito’s liquor license renewal application March 14.

There are certain dates every year that bring huge crowds and a scandalous amount of alcohol consumption to the streets of Manhattan. Upcoming St. Patrick’s Day is a big one, followed by Cinco de Mayo. Independence Day is up there, but it’s not nearly as boozy as Halloween or New Year’s Eve.
Local residents usually either join in the fun or batten down the hatches and prepare to spend a weekend battling roving packs of jolly drinkers. But residents of Community Board 6, which encompasses the area east of Lexington Avenue from 14th to 59th Street, are taking a different route and actively trying to staunch the flow of beer taps in their neighborhoods on these revered holidays.
They’re not against drinking and they’re not against business, they say, but they are hoping to cut down on activities that promote excessive amounts of the former while not really helping the latter; one of those activities, according to the board, is the pub crawl.
“We’ve had a growing problem with organized pub crawls and they’ve been getting larger and larger in time with the growth of social media,” said Mark Thompson, chair of Community Board 6. “Last year, it was pretty disastrous for our neighborhood.”
What used to be a fairly small ritual of groups of locals migrating from one watering hole to the next has ballooned into thousands of people from all over the city—and some from farther away—swarming the neighborhoods for an entire weekend.
Pub crawls don’t just bring in revenue to the participating bars. Companies like JoonBug Productions, which owns BarCrawls.com, make a chunk of change by organizing, promoting and charging patrons for tickets to the drinking routes.
Their St. Paddy’s Day Shamrock Shuffle features 17 bars, 11 of which are in the Community District 6 neighborhoods of Murray Hill, Gramercy and Kips Bay. To get drink specials at each bar, customers need to have a ticket. BarCrawls.com sells a $15 ticket for the St. Patrick’s Day crawl or a $20 all-access pass for the entire weekend.
That ticket buys a wristband, a cup and the privilege of buying $2 draft beers, $3 bottled beers, $4 mixed drinks and $5 shots, though the specials vary by place and time throughout the day. The event runs from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., which is typical of most organized pub crawls.
A representative for Joonbug refused to disclose the number of people who bought tickets to last year’s Turtle Bay pub crawl or answer questions about where the ticket sales go or if they have ever reached out to the community to listen to concerns about what the pub crawls might bring to a largely residential area.
A competitor’s site, PubCrawls.com, sells tickets for a massive, Manhattan-wide crawl of 115 participating bars, but a representative said that many are concentrated in Midtown and on the East Side. Last year, they had over 2,000 participants sign up for one or more of their St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl events.
While the pub crawls are obviously many people’s idea of a good time, neighbors complain that cheap booze plus throngs of tourists plus drinking from morning ’til night creates an intolerable atmosphere.
“Pub crawls have become a major issue; last year, the police department had to shut down several streets” over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, said Toni Carlina, district manager of CB6.
“The majority of this district is residential. There are many bars on the commercial strips, and the commercial strips wrap around the residential blocks, anywhere from 100 to 150 feet, with an average of 125 feet.”
According to data from the State Liquor Authority, there are about 120 bars on Third Avenue alone within Community District 6. Second Avenue boasts about 86 bars, and there are dozens more on side streets and other avenues.
CB6 has worked diligently in recent years to curb excessively loud and boisterous drinking along these popular avenues by only approving liquor licenses if certain bars agree to close at 2 a.m. The move to reduce organized pub crawls is an extension of that effort.
Bar owners are now presented with a Change Agreement from the Board when their license comes up for review, something that only happens, Carlina said, if it’s a new license or a renewal where the establishment has a record of complaints through 311 or the NYPD over the past four years. The agreement stipulates that bars won’t participate in organized pub crawls (though no one can stop self-organized groups of pals wandering about, of course), and when it’s signed, it becomes a legal document and part of that establishment’s state license when the SLA approves it.
Some area bars have agreed to the “no pub crawl” mandate voluntarily.
“In the past, obviously, we’ve done it because it does get people through the door,” said Erin Linfonte, the marketing manager at Turtle Bay NYC, a large pub on 52nd Street and Second Avenue that regularly advertises parties and specials. She said they’ve agreed to stay out of organized crawls.
“We always like to comply with the Community Board,” she said. “It’s not really hurting us that much [to stay out of pub crawls]. It just promotes daytime drinking in the neighborhood, and it’s a really a family neighborhood.”
“For the most part, people have been very compliant,” said Thompson. “However, it’s a very difficult thing to control.” If a bar that has signed the agreement violates it, they might have to go before the SLA for a hearing and risk a suspension of their license.
Some bar owners are baffled as to why the board would try to stifle pub crawls.
“I don’t know why CB6 would want to block bar crawls,” said Tony Mykon, manager of Duke’s on Third Avenue. “It brings clientele into restaurants, hopefully gains future business. It’s a good day for most bars, but it’s more marketing, getting the name out, getting new people in.” When bars participate in organized crawls, they get promotion from the companies sponsoring the event, which some say is a small price to pay for offering reduced drink prices.
“We are always going to get revenue, but the bar crawl opens the door to new patrons who normally would not come around here,” Mykon said.
So far, the board has officially got 17 bars to sign the change agreement and opt out of pub crawls, which doesn’t include others who may voluntarily opt out. But with hundreds of bars in the district, it’s a small wedge in a booming celebratory tradition, and locals are still bracing for the upcoming crawl weekend.
Thompson said St. Patrick’s Day is especially tough because the NYPD is stretched thin covering the parade that day.
“Second and Third Avenue are big areas [for bars]. It’s great for them to draw a larger crowd in. Everyone wants to go out on the special day,” Thompson said. “When there’s such a high concentration of people and bars when it’s normally pretty quiet, it just gets out of hand.”

Last month we blogged about the possible closing of Heathers, saying that “based on the atmosphere at the Community Board hearing, Heathers [was] on its way out.”  It seems that we may have spoken too soon.  Despite CB3′s attempts to stop the bar’s license renewal, the State Liquor Authority (SLA) approved Heathers’ license renewal.

Amid protests of public urination and pot smoking it seemed sure that CB3 would force the doors shut at Heathers.  However, neighbors are in an uproar after the CB3 decision was overturned by the SLA.  The owner of Heathers, Heather Millstone, was also baffled by the decision, “Frankly I have no clue what happens at the SLA!” she said, “I’m just happy the Heathers will keep its doors open for the diverse group of people who really put it out there that it should stick around.”

Millstone did not sit idly by as her bar faced expulsion from the neighborhood.  She sent out a press release, pleading her case.  In the release Millstone blamed the NYC smoking ban inside her bar for the noisy streets.  According to Millstone, if the patrons cannot smoke inside, then they have to take their butt breaks outside, and that occasionally gets loud.  She also stated that she had made several alterations to the bar in order to keep it quiet.

In nothing short of a PR miracle, Millstone has managed to save her bar and receive a renewed liquor license.  It looks like the residents of the 13th St. block on Avenue A will just have to invest in a good set of ear plugs.

By McCamey Lynn