Nightclub says race is factor in dispute
S.F. authorities want to restrict lounge over noise, fights
San Francisco is seeking to restrict a North Beach nightclub’s entertainment permit over a series of noise complaints and alleged drunken brawls, prompting the club’s owner to say he’s being targeted by neighbors and the city police force because of his primarily African American clientele.
Hue Lounge and Nightclub at 447 Broadway experiences the same sorts of issues as other businesses where patrons consume alcohol and shouldn’t lose its ability to host live music
after midnight, said owner Bennett Montoya, who on Wednesday will appeal the city Entertainment Commission’s decision to restrict the permit.
But the club’s neighbors — and the Central Station officers that patrol the Broadway corridor — plan on fighting the appeal.
Fed up with what they see as a chronic problem of fights spilling into the street and intoxicated patrons stumbling along the sidewalk, they were angered that Montoya brought race into the dispute. They say they don’t see race when it comes to the club’s customers — only inebriated hooligans causing problems for others.
Undercurrents in the permit battle include the contention that San Francisco has for years failed to support black residents and businesses as well as the decades-long struggle by North Beach neighbors and merchants to clean up a corridor known for after-hours trouble. For both sides, more is at stake than one club’s entertainment license.
“As a resident of the Fillmore for the past 45 years, I have witnessed firsthand how this city has systematically destroyed nightlife for minorities, particularly people of color,” the Rev. Arnold Townsend, vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, wrote in a letter of support for the club, “and I will not stand by and watch it happen to yet another venue.”
But many community members say it wasn’t long ago that drunken violence was considered the norm along Broadway. In the past decade, they say, business owners have come together to balance entertainment and public safety, and it won’t take much to upset that.
“We’ve made great strides working with the police and working with nonprofits in securing the area, but Hue is really shooting the Broadway corridor in the foot with these business practices,” said Dominic LiMandri, district manager for the Top of Broadway Community Benefit District. “This has never been an issue about race. This has always been an issue of the incidents reported, and those incidents have been consistent.”
Many of the incidents have been caught on neighbors’ surveillance cameras — with the videos, submitted to the Entertainment Commission, showing fights bursting out of the club and police officers rushing to stem the chaos.
“From August of 2015 to May of 2017, there were 65 incidents that we recorded, between noise complaints, municipal police code violations, being drunk in public, fights, assaults, battery on a police officer, resisting arrest, aggravated assault,” said police Cmdr. David Lazar, who served as Central Station captain from 2014 to earlier this year.
Lazar said the neighborhood experienced the same problems with the club before it was rebranded as Hue a few years ago — it was known as Atmosphere when Montoya opened it in 2008 — and the issues had nothing to do with race. He said that officers were injured in at least two incidents at the club.
“It was the long lines in the front, it was overserving, it was overselling tickets, it was overcrowding, it was not controlling the bottle service, it was fights getting pushed out into the street,” Lazar said.
When he took over Central Station, Lazar said he wanted to work with Montoya and his staff to make the club successful and safe. He said Montoya was slow to make changes, while Montoya said he sensed racial undertones in the neighbors’ complaints and the police efforts to help.
“I’ve been in meetings with the captain and the permit officer and even the (community benefit district) where they basically said that the crowd you’re bringing in and the type of music that you’re playing, we would highly recommend that you stop doing that and attracting ‘that type’ of demographic,” Montoya said.
Steven Funkhouser, Hue’s general manager, said that in “community benefit district meetings and private meetings, they’ve accused us of bringing ‘Oakland and Richmond’ out here. It doesn’t take too far to read what that means.”
Lazar and LiMandri said that when problems persisted despite their efforts, they looked to other avenues to pressure the club into compliance. The state Department of Alcohol Beverage Control got involved, accusing the club in 2015 of running a disorderly house and suspending its liquor license for 45 days.
After Montoya appealed the decision, Administrative Law Judge Sonny Lo issued a ruling that supported some of Montoya’s claims, saying, “We believe the appellant has made a strong case that it was targeted for more enforcement than other establishments in the Broadway area by the SFPD.”
The NAACP and the San Francisco African American Chamber of Commerce have since gotten involved. Montoya said a restriction on live music could put him out of business.
“In our review of other nightclub incidents in San Francisco, people have been stabbed, murdered, assaulted with deadly weapons in nightclubs; yet these clubs are still open,” Frederick Jordan, the chamber’s president, wrote in a letter of support.
The club’s critics say the city’s response to it hasn’t reflected bias, but concern over the danger of the situation.
“I don’t care who their patrons are,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents the neighborhood and spoke out against Hue at an Entertainment Commission meeting in June. “Broadway has always been a very diverse entertainment zone. I just care about when people are beating the s— out of each other in the street. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets killed.”