NABE’S BOTTLE BATTLE
Anti-bar activists at war
Lower East Side nightclub owners are in a bar fight against anti-booze activists— prompting what some hospitality reps are calling the death of New York night life.
The bar wars have resulted in one lounge mogul’s last call, as Rob Shamlian last week announced he would sell The Derby along with two other gin mills after being targeted for years by activist group LES Dwellers.
“The reasons for these sales isn’t a decline in business,” Shamlian wrote on the Bowery Boogie blog. “It’s a quality-of-life issue and I’ve had enough of the hostile neighborhood groups, the blogs with no culpability who are able to spout whatever nonsense they think of and the constant harassment.”
Demands by groups like LES Dwellers are “killing” the city’s night life, according to Robert Bookman, counsel to the New York City Hospitality Alliance.
“They go for the jugular,” he said. “They go above and beyond any other community groups I’ve ever seen. They’ll bring up violations you had five years ago.”
LES Dwellers launched in 2012 to cork bad bar operators in the nineblock area called Hell Square, which is bounded by Houston, Delancey, Allen and Essex streets. A year later, they formed the Downtown Action Coalition to share tips and tactics with other neighborhoods battling booze.
“Imagine having SantaCon here every night,” LES Dwellers founder Diem Boyd told The Post. “We live with screaming and yelling — we can’t sleep at night. Then we have to clean up the mess and the vomit in the morning.”
LES Dwellers tracks taverns that violate their liquor licenses and Department of Buildings permits, and circulates petitions against unruly proprietors seeking to expand. Last year, it persuaded the New York State Liquor Authority to deny Shamlian’s application for a basement bar at Derby. In 2013, it successfully lobbied a community board to deny Shamlian’s liquor license for Tiny Fork.
Boyd’s faction also collects video evidence to present to city agencies and the SLA. A Dec. 21 video showed the neighbors’ plight: At 3 a.m., one drunk urinated in a doorway, the NYPD broke up a fight and a man brawled with a Pianos bouncer.
Still, not all residents welcome the booze patrols. In 2013, the community board “suspended” LES Dwellers as a recognized block association for secretly meeting with bar owners without board approval and submitting reports to the SLA.
Alexander Dimitrov of Mehanata Bulgarian Bar on Ludlow Street, which is also in LES Dwellers’ cross hairs, said neighbors constantly call 311 on his club.
“These people have no mercy,” he said.