brief: westneat on closing time
In the wake of the Mayor’s much-mocked identification of Seattle’s most trouble-making nightclubs, Danny Westneat surveys the scene in the “Bermuda Triangle of nightlife” (a.k.a. Belltown), finds it a lot less placid than Paul Constant did [stranger], and suggests a simple solution to our nightlife woes:
Up the street it’s worse. A mini-rumble starts in the push out from the most jammed club, the See Sound Lounge. A man is body-slammed into a 10-foot window fronting a haute cuisine restaurant, Mistral. A waterfall of glass showers down on the wrestling men, the sidewalk, the street.The men bolt. The crowd gets volatile, taunting and shoving. A bouncer tells me later that someone pulled a gun.
From my vantage, which you better believe is at some remove, the See Sound crowd is about to merge with the Belltown Billiards crowd. Three cop cars race up to cordon the street, and slowly, over 20 minutes, the tension eases.
It makes me wonder: Is closing time contributing to our nightclub crisis?
What if we just let the clubs stay open?
[times]
Although it’s certainly obvious to anyone chased out of bars early This kind of straightforward, thoughtful, and practical suggestion is a shock to find in the Times’s opinion pages. Still, reading about the brewing melee on Blanchard I couldn’t help but wonder if the Crocodile’s decision to clear the bar at a very early 12:15 am [!!] following the Bishop Allen show was for the protection of showgoers who might not have been able to navigate the brewing sidewalk turf war without a head start.
update: Dan Savage also found this story late this afternoon and says that news from the U.K. isn’t so compelling. [slog]
I don’t know if this is standard policy anywhere, but at one time (during a big football championship) Manchester replaced the fixed, universal closing time with staggered closings: in a given area, each pub would close at a different time, so that the rush of drunk, moody people onto the street was more gradual. That seemed to be the policy that did the most to reduce alcohol-fuelled violence.
“This kind of straightforward, thoughtful, and practical suggestion is a shock to find in the Times’s opinion pages.”
Danny Westneat is consistently straightforward and thoughtful; his column is the only one in the Times that I consistently enjoy reading.
Eldan — I wonder if such a policy would be nightmarish to administer on a regular basis. Would bar owners all be petitioning for the latest closing times?
I confess that there’s something nice about being forced to go home before sunrise, but having everyone forcibly tossed out onto the street fifteen minutes after they’ve been encouraged to chug their last drink makes for an unpleasant experience and a recipe for trouble.
Josh: that may well be why I’ve only heard of it being instituted temporarily for a specific event. I seem to recall that the bars took turns having earlier and later closing, which would certainly be a logistical and administrative nightmare, but probably worth doing for a weeks during a big sports tournament.
bishop allen was an all-ages show, so no surprise it was done early. an all-ages crowd is also less likely to hang around & keep drinking (for those that can). most weekend shows at the croc regularly finish ~1am… with normal seattle last-call ~1:15 ;)
I’m pretty skeptical about the doom-and-gloom news from Britain. Shortly before closing time was abolished, the press decided en masse that they were going to kill the change, and pretty much all of their coverage since has been coloured by bitterness that the govt went ahead and did what they promised to do instead of listening to the newspapers’ scaremongering.
I realise anectodal evidence is all but worthless, but I lived there under the old regime, and go back once or twice a year, and pub culture is much healthier for the absence of a uniform closing time.