Post 4: A movement begins and succeeds

As always, with the exception of public figures, I use altered names to protect the individuals in this history.

In the audience was a Bleeker Street resident and local activist Zephyr (I've altered her name) who contacted LESA through me expressing an interest in furthering the goal of curtailing the spread of nightlife. She had contacts with Community District 2 and Chelsea. While the members of LESA were wary of expanding beyond its CD3 borders, I willingly agreed to attend a meeting between Shelby, a prominent CD2 local political activist, Zephyr and a local Chelsea activist I'll call Wendy. This group decided to hold a candidates forum at the highly visible, prominent and swank Public Theater, a venue of city-wide notoriety. Zephyr seemed to have experience and contacts and access to the funds necessary to pull off such an event which included catering as well as renting the space. LESA, true to its grassroots do-it-yourself resistance mode remained skeptical of the event and, other than myself, did not participate in organizing.

This event occurred shortly after the city council election. The new council member agreed to be a panelist along with a deputy mayor and some other local electeds. The new council member at the last minute sent a staff member, saying that she’d been injured and couldn’t appear. (In my experience, newly elected office holders are often cautious of events that might commit them to programs they have not fully calculated. I assume this was the real reason for her no-show, not the injury, though for all I know it may have been the injury and not such political caution.) LESA members attended in the audience, as did the Community Board 3 chair David and the District Manager Susan. I took distinct pleasure in seeing them there in the audience. Although LESA viewed the event as high-level political shenanigans – a perspective many anti-establishment activists hold when established operators take up their cause – I saw this prestige event, recognizing our broad resistance movement, as an affront to the low-level wannabe powerbrokers in CB3. At last they had to attend and listen, dutifully, with no role but audience.

In a turn-around for the CB3 administration, CB3 arranged for their own town hall or meeting on bar proliferation, only a few months after they’d boycotted our event and the District Manager’s failed attempt to scotch our efforts from the start. The tide had turned. Resistance to commercial gentrification held the upper hand, the small-time bosses had to get in line.

There followed two events that changed the political landscape regarding bars and liquor licenses. Two women were murdered, one committed by a bar bouncer, another by a bar patron, both in our area. Quickly these murders silenced the objections to the effort to curtail liquor licenses. Zephyr arranged a “summit” between the State Liquor Authority, local law enforcement, local electeds and local activist representatives. the end result was the appointment of a city resident to the SLA – amazingly, there had been no city representative on the SLA board – and a moratorium on liquor licenses in our area. The city resident lived in Brooklyn, in Martin Connor’s assembly district, Connor being the Assembly Majority Leader at them time.

The moratorium remained until the 2008 financial collapse, when the state desperately needed to boost commerce in the recession that followed. Bars thrive countercyclically with the economy. Unemployment draws the idle to bars and liquor. The governor appointed a new SLA commissioner who set out to expedite licenses.