Club Six is a popular nightclub that has invigorated the seedy Sixth Street corridor, attracted new businesses nearby, and generally made it safer to walk that area at night. Yet along the way, the expanding club has become a magnet for noise complaints from adjacent residents of single-room-occupancy hotels who are pushing the city to yank the club's permits and perhaps put it out of business.
The San Francisco Entertainment Commission will hear the case June 5 and decide how to balance a campaign started by a few irritated neighbors and then organized by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC) against concerns that the city is fast becoming less tolerant of nightlife and a vibrant urban culture (see "Death of Fun, the Sequel," 4/25/07).
"The concept of mixed use is going to be put to the ultimate test," Robert Davis, executive director of the commission, told the Guardian. "With the influx of housing in every neighborhood, it takes a careful hand to balance those uses, and that's what the commission is trying to do.
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Club Six is located in an old brick building underneath the Lawrence Hotel, where some residents complain that music rumbles their rooms and keeps them up at night. They blame club owner Angel Cruz. "His music kept getting louder and louder until it was vibrating the rooms up here," said Jim Ayers, the Lawrence Hotel resident who has filed the most noise complaints. "He ignores the law and doesn't care about this area whatsoever."
Yet Cruz said he's put more than $1 million into the club since he bought it in 2001, back when the neighborhood was mostly vacant storefronts and junkies ruled the streets. Those improvements include more than $229,000 in sound-accentuation work, mostly focused on the Lawrence Hotel.
"I thought it was a great space that could be developed into something special, which it has become. And this was a turnaround neighborhood," Cruz told us, noting that the space has been a bar since the 1930s and that several new clubs followed him into the neighborhood. "I think we've been a good neighbor. Do we make noise? Every club in town makes noise. And if you're going to shut us down, you should shut down every club in town."
Cruz said the problems began two years ago when Ayers complained about noise from the club and sued him in small claims court, asking for $7,500. Before the case went to trial, Ayers offered to settle the case and stop complaining (Ayers told us he wanted $3,500; Cruz said it was $5,000), but Cruz refused, and the judge eventually awarded Ayers $500.
"He was trying to extort money from me so he wouldn't keep complaining," Cruz said of Ayers. "He was upset that he only got $500 and told me he would make my life a living hell, which he has."
Ayers maintains that it's about noise and not money, but he admits that the unsatisfying end to the case prompted him to keep complaining and seek regulatory relief. "He said to me that I can't do a damn thing to him," Ayers told us. "Well, I say, 'Mr. Cruz, look what I've done now.'"
Since January of last year, Ayers and a few other persistent complainers have triggered regular police visits to the club, organizational and political help from the THC (publisher of www.beyondchron.org, ...
Any of you who show up to support Angel and his band of miscreants on June 5 over the welfare of the residents of the Lawrence Hotel should be ashamed of yourselves. You put your so called “right” to party over the right of people to sleep in their homes. Where do you live Steve? Maybe we should open a club up in your basement.
[link]
But a couple issues jump out at me. First of all, as a clubber, I've been to all kind of venues, from house parties, raves, discos and rock concerts. I've never heard of a legitimate club that does not respect the sound ordinances of the city they operate in. It sounds like to me that Mr. Cruz has done some work in providing sound proofing if he's spent over 200,000 grand.
However, having spoken to the neighbors of Club 6, who are human beings with the right to sleep or be relatively undisturbed, the level of bass leakage into their units is beyond disturbing. Having been to Club 6, the volume is ear numbing. Does it have to be? Maybe the answer is not sound proofing but simply getting rid of the low end bass.
Plus, a permit is a privilege not a right. It would seem that it is incumbent on the Bay Guardian and/or the owners of Club 6 to show that the sound levels in the neighbor's units have been reduced to liveable levels.
I've known many clubs where you can't even tell there's music going on inside until you are inside. On 6th Street you can hear Club 6's beats inside your skull when you are many feet away, sometimes enclosed in your own vehicle. That can't be ok. I love loud music, but it partially ruins it for me if I get the sense that someone else is being tortured by it.
Maybe that's just me.
But a couple issues jump out at me. First of all, as a clubber, I've been to all kind of venues, from house parties, raves, discos and rock concerts. I've never heard of a legitimate club that does not respect the sound ordinances of the city they operate in. It sounds like to me that Mr. Cruz has done some work in providing sound proofing if he's spent over 200,000 grand.
However, having spoken to the neighbors of Club 6, who are human beings with the right to sleep or be relatively undisturbed, the level of bass leakage into their units is beyond disturbing. Having been to Club 6, the volume is ear numbing. Does it have to be? Maybe the answer is not sound proofing but simply getting rid of the low end bass.
Plus, a permit is a privilege not a right. It would seem that it is incumbent on the Bay Guardian and/or the owners of Club 6 to show that the sound levels in the neighbor's units have been reduced to liveable levels.
I've known many clubs where you can't even tell there's music going on inside until you are inside. On 6th Street you can hear Club 6's beats inside your skull when you are many feet away, sometimes enclosed in your own vehicle. That can't be ok. I love loud music, but it partially ruins it for me if I get the sense that someone else is being tortured by it.
Maybe that's just me.
I understand that Club Six's neighbors don't want to see that there are legitimately two sides to this story, but there are and that's what my story presents. I didn't take a side and I defy my critics to point out statements I made that are so biased and unfair that I should resign. Please. As Davis correctly pointed out, sound issues in mixed use neighborhoods are not easy to resolve and that conflict is what this story is about.
Meanwhile, the Bay Guardian receives advertising revenue from Club Six so they arguably do have a financial stake at hand. Besides regularly featuring an ad in its paper edition, the Guardian’s blog has posted a 'Save Club Six' ad urging concerned patrons to contact the Entertainment Commission. The Guardian even created a 'Save Club Six' page on its own web server at [link], presumably at its own expense."
As for the advertising: Club Six is, indeed, a Bay Guardian advertiser. (None of our ad revenue is a secret; you can see it all in the paper every week.) But anyone who knows us and has paid a whit of attention over the years knows that have have a clear line between edit and advertising, and edit NEVER takes a position or does a story to please an advertiser. In fact, it's usually the opposite, as our long-suffering sales people know all too well.
Club Six also paid for an ad on our web page. Anyone who wants to buy space on the site is welcome to do so (as long as the ad meets our overall standards, that is, as long as it's not libelous or a consumer fraud). That's the beginning and the end of the story.
Tim Redmond
I'm telling you, having been in the Hotel during club hours, it's gonna take a lot more than $229K to alleviate the problem. It's going to take retrofitting the entire building so it doesn't shake from the bass downstairs. That's the issue in the hotel. It's like a constant earthquake. You cannot possibly sleep comfortably in such a situation. Steve, take some responsibility. for the sake of pretending to be neutral, at least go into the Hotel and get a taste of the other side of the story. It's the responsible thing to do.
The crackdowns on street fairs and long-existing bars initiated by wealthy, new San Franciscans that seek to turn a SF into a banal Danville clone is a huge problem. What remains of the authentic, contrarian city so many of us fell in love with before the dot-com days must be defended against gentrification. But aging progressives like Jones, for whom loud music and creativity are unquestionable representations of subversion, need to wake up to the fact that these symbols of rebellion have in so many cases, become empty, dead, signifiers--a way for conformists goons to play at being bad on Friday night. It is precisely Club Six and the upper-middle class, ‘creative capitalist’ types that frequent it that are extinguishing our “vibrant urban culture,” pushing their leechy, privileged party-lifestyle into the few harbors for the poor left in San Francisco; attempting to turn the few “edgy” corners of the city into an endless Cancun spring break or a gritty, city streets theme park.
The classism here is disgusting. Jones’s absurd comment that Club 6 emerged bravely in the neighborhood back when “junkies ruled the streets,”--as if the weak, dispossessed victims of poverty-induced drug addiction are boss figures in some mafia-like power clique tyrannizing Sixth Street-is absolutely pathetic. The idea that this story is objective or balanced is ridiculous. The subtext of every paragraph is that the long-time residents are filthy, lazy, drug addicts and therefore even if their claims are legitimate on some level, well, hey they’ve let the area go to shit, so lets let the magic of money and cultural capitalism give the place a working over.
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