Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Recording Artist Viola Wills Passes Away - RIP
Recording artist Viola Wills passed away on May 6, 2009. Viola was the first recording artist that we booked at Faces on Fourth Street when I bought the bar 16 years ago. RIP Viola.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Recession hits British Pubs - More Drinking at Home
From WSJ on April 16, 2007:
"By JENNIFER MARTINEZ
LONDON -- As the recession prompts U.K. pub crawlers to drink at home more often, two of the country's biggest pub owners are selling or closing hundreds of locations to pay the tab from a decade-long expansion.
Punch Taverns PLC and Enterprise Inns PLC together own nearly a third of the U.K.'s 56,000 public houses. The two emerged as leaders of the pub industry by borrowing heavily when credit was cheap, snapping up thousands of the cherished British drinking halls, which have long served as both an extension of the living room and the social nexus of neighborhoods here.
Getty Images
Beer consumption in U.K. pubs fell nearly 10% last December.
But now the credit crunch and the recession have combined to force a retrenchment. Consumers are increasingly likely to buy their beer at the supermarket, where it costs about £1 ($1.49) a can, rather than pay about £3 for a pint at the local pub. A ban on smoking in pubs that took effect in 2007 is also keeping some people home.
Punch and Enterprise saw their 2008 revenue fall 8.2% and 4.5%, respectively, from 2007.
"London pubs are so expensive," said Stewert Melvin as he smoked a cigarette in front of a Punch pub on Fleet Street on Wednesday.
While Mr. Melvin, who works at an investment bank in the City, has room in his budget to go to a pub and prefers to drink whisky there, he said he frequently orders beer lately because it's cheaper. Mr. Melvin said pubs are "noticeably less full" in his East London neighborhood.
British students favor drinking at home before going out on the weekend because "it's more economical," said Nikhil Khosla, 21 years old. A student at the London School of Economics, he was watching soccer team Arsenal beat the Villarreal team at the Coach and Horses pub off Fleet Street. "This cost me £3.50," he said, pointing to his pint.
In all, beer consumption in U.K. pubs was down 9.9% in December 2008, according to the British Beer and Pub Association, and pubs sell 6.7 million fewer pints per day than they did 10 years ago.
As cash flow from their pubs has dwindled, the debt accumulated by Punch and Enterprise has become problematic. These days, the companies are relying largely on proceeds from pub sales to pay down billions in debt.
Though the two companies' shares have risen slightly in recent weeks, their stocks are still down sharply from a year ago, Punch's by 82% and Enterprise's by 69%.
The sales come amid general alarm in Britain about pub closures. In recent weeks, the industry has frequently cited a statistic indicating that 39 pubs are closing a week as the recession picks up steam. About half of those closings involve pubs that are independently run, while 40% or so come from pub aggregators such as Punch and Enterprise.
Pub owners say they can't keep up with cheaper retail beer prices. "The supermarkets are killing trade" in pubs, says Anne Biggs, a former Punch publican, or saloonkeeper, in St. Helens in northwest England.
Punch and Enterprise have £4.5 billion and £3.7 billion in debt, respectively. Both companies aim to sell more than 200 pubs this year, significantly more than analysts had expected last fall.
The companies will continue to shed a similar number next year, the analysts believe, though that will hinge on how much cash they receive from the sales.
"The absolute magnitude of the debt they have means they will need to reduce it just to ensure that when they negotiate any debt facility, they'll be in a slightly better position," says Charles Stanley Securities analyst James Dawson.
Increasingly, Enterprise's plan is to sell pubs that aren't performing well to buyers who will redevelop the sites as office buildings or restaurants, or even knock them down for housing complexes. The pub company, which owns more than 7,000 locations, has sold 150 pubs so far this year, more than double the number sold in 2008.
"If we can get a better price for a building that is no longer viable as a pub, then clearly we would sell it for alternative use," says Enterprise Chief Executive Ted Tuppen.
"Basically what the current recession has highlighted," he adds, "is the accelerated closure of pubs that would have been unviable over time."
Enterprise currently has securitized bonds of £1.6 billion and a bank syndicated facility of £1 billion that expires in 2011. The company's plan to sell off its pubs is partly aimed at reducing the £1 billion bank syndicated facility so the entire amount doesn't have to be refinanced, says KPC Peel Hunt analyst Paul Hickman.
"They'll need to have made those debt reductions before the end of 2010. The pressure on them is in this year and next year," Mr. Hickman says.
The current focus at Punch -- which leases 7,560 locations and manages another 864 -- is to sell its pubs to current tenants. The bulk of Punch's debt is securitized. The company bought up thousands of pubs over the years and set up a program that secured its debt against the pubs already under its ownership.
At the end of 2008, Punch wrote to 500 tenants of its "worst performing outlets" and offered them the chance to buy the lease, a Punch spokesman says. He adds that the publicans will be able to continue operating the pubs even if they decline to place a bid."
"By JENNIFER MARTINEZ
LONDON -- As the recession prompts U.K. pub crawlers to drink at home more often, two of the country's biggest pub owners are selling or closing hundreds of locations to pay the tab from a decade-long expansion.
Punch Taverns PLC and Enterprise Inns PLC together own nearly a third of the U.K.'s 56,000 public houses. The two emerged as leaders of the pub industry by borrowing heavily when credit was cheap, snapping up thousands of the cherished British drinking halls, which have long served as both an extension of the living room and the social nexus of neighborhoods here.
Getty Images
Beer consumption in U.K. pubs fell nearly 10% last December.
But now the credit crunch and the recession have combined to force a retrenchment. Consumers are increasingly likely to buy their beer at the supermarket, where it costs about £1 ($1.49) a can, rather than pay about £3 for a pint at the local pub. A ban on smoking in pubs that took effect in 2007 is also keeping some people home.
Punch and Enterprise saw their 2008 revenue fall 8.2% and 4.5%, respectively, from 2007.
"London pubs are so expensive," said Stewert Melvin as he smoked a cigarette in front of a Punch pub on Fleet Street on Wednesday.
While Mr. Melvin, who works at an investment bank in the City, has room in his budget to go to a pub and prefers to drink whisky there, he said he frequently orders beer lately because it's cheaper. Mr. Melvin said pubs are "noticeably less full" in his East London neighborhood.
British students favor drinking at home before going out on the weekend because "it's more economical," said Nikhil Khosla, 21 years old. A student at the London School of Economics, he was watching soccer team Arsenal beat the Villarreal team at the Coach and Horses pub off Fleet Street. "This cost me £3.50," he said, pointing to his pint.
In all, beer consumption in U.K. pubs was down 9.9% in December 2008, according to the British Beer and Pub Association, and pubs sell 6.7 million fewer pints per day than they did 10 years ago.
As cash flow from their pubs has dwindled, the debt accumulated by Punch and Enterprise has become problematic. These days, the companies are relying largely on proceeds from pub sales to pay down billions in debt.
Though the two companies' shares have risen slightly in recent weeks, their stocks are still down sharply from a year ago, Punch's by 82% and Enterprise's by 69%.
The sales come amid general alarm in Britain about pub closures. In recent weeks, the industry has frequently cited a statistic indicating that 39 pubs are closing a week as the recession picks up steam. About half of those closings involve pubs that are independently run, while 40% or so come from pub aggregators such as Punch and Enterprise.
Pub owners say they can't keep up with cheaper retail beer prices. "The supermarkets are killing trade" in pubs, says Anne Biggs, a former Punch publican, or saloonkeeper, in St. Helens in northwest England.
Punch and Enterprise have £4.5 billion and £3.7 billion in debt, respectively. Both companies aim to sell more than 200 pubs this year, significantly more than analysts had expected last fall.
The companies will continue to shed a similar number next year, the analysts believe, though that will hinge on how much cash they receive from the sales.
"The absolute magnitude of the debt they have means they will need to reduce it just to ensure that when they negotiate any debt facility, they'll be in a slightly better position," says Charles Stanley Securities analyst James Dawson.
Increasingly, Enterprise's plan is to sell pubs that aren't performing well to buyers who will redevelop the sites as office buildings or restaurants, or even knock them down for housing complexes. The pub company, which owns more than 7,000 locations, has sold 150 pubs so far this year, more than double the number sold in 2008.
"If we can get a better price for a building that is no longer viable as a pub, then clearly we would sell it for alternative use," says Enterprise Chief Executive Ted Tuppen.
"Basically what the current recession has highlighted," he adds, "is the accelerated closure of pubs that would have been unviable over time."
Enterprise currently has securitized bonds of £1.6 billion and a bank syndicated facility of £1 billion that expires in 2011. The company's plan to sell off its pubs is partly aimed at reducing the £1 billion bank syndicated facility so the entire amount doesn't have to be refinanced, says KPC Peel Hunt analyst Paul Hickman.
"They'll need to have made those debt reductions before the end of 2010. The pressure on them is in this year and next year," Mr. Hickman says.
The current focus at Punch -- which leases 7,560 locations and manages another 864 -- is to sell its pubs to current tenants. The bulk of Punch's debt is securitized. The company bought up thousands of pubs over the years and set up a program that secured its debt against the pubs already under its ownership.
At the end of 2008, Punch wrote to 500 tenants of its "worst performing outlets" and offered them the chance to buy the lease, a Punch spokesman says. He adds that the publicans will be able to continue operating the pubs even if they decline to place a bid."
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Great new video from DJ Bill Bennett & Suzanne Palmer
Great new video and music remix by DJ Bill Bennett and recording artist Suzanne Palmer. For regular customers, Bill and Suzanne both performed at Faces.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Nashville's Oldest Gay Bar Closed in July 2007
From Out & About - Nashville Posted 07/20/2007
Nashville’s oldest gay bar, The Chute, will be closing its doors at the end of this month after more than 23 years in business. The closing was confirmed to Inside Out Nashville publisher Linda Welch by owner Don Hartsfield.
The Chute, located at 2535 Franklin Road, has operated six different themed clubs under one roof and served as home bar for several local community groups including the Smoky Mountain Rodeo Association, the Music City Bears and The Conductors.
"It’s sad to see a business that had been such a staple in the community close its doors after so many years,” said John Wade, president of the Nashville GLBT Chamber of Commerce. “I understand that the club business is difficult to operate. The community has certainly enjoyed a lot of nightlife there for years, and we wish the owners and employees the best.”
Nashville’s oldest gay bar, The Chute, will be closing its doors at the end of this month after more than 23 years in business. The closing was confirmed to Inside Out Nashville publisher Linda Welch by owner Don Hartsfield.
The Chute, located at 2535 Franklin Road, has operated six different themed clubs under one roof and served as home bar for several local community groups including the Smoky Mountain Rodeo Association, the Music City Bears and The Conductors.
"It’s sad to see a business that had been such a staple in the community close its doors after so many years,” said John Wade, president of the Nashville GLBT Chamber of Commerce. “I understand that the club business is difficult to operate. The community has certainly enjoyed a lot of nightlife there for years, and we wish the owners and employees the best.”
Complex Nightclub Opens New Concept Bar
From STLToday.com on February 24, 2009:
"St. Louis has another new place to play it cool.
It’s called Chill, at 3515 Chouteau Avenue in the same building the Complex, a long-running dance club.
Chill is very different than the thumping Complex upstairs.
“While you’re down here, you’re away from all the hoopla,” says Howard Meyer, who owns both spots. “You don’t have to see any of the Complex to come here.”
The quieter Chill, a “happy hour lounge,” has darts, an Internet jukebox, frozen cocktails, cheap drinks, a coffee bar and free happy hour food that includes everything from sloppy Joes to nachos.
It also has a light menu with handcrafted personal pizzas, Big Gus’ pretzels and more.
Chill opened quietly Dec. 29 but has a grand opening scheduled for Monday. The event is a benefit for Stray Rescue of St. Louis.
“It’s going to be huge,” Meyer says. The grand gpening will include free appetizers.
Prior to opening as Chill, the space was Trade, a rock ’n’ roll bar that lasted only a short time last year.
“The space was just sitting, and I said I have too many friends, so I might as well create an environment they could enjoy,” Meyer says.
Chill is being promoted as more mainstream than the Complex, which targets gays and lesbians, including female impersonator shows hosted by Dieta Pepsi on Sunday nights.
“We want a hugely diverse population with husbands and wives, single women and professionals, along with gays and lesbians,” he says. “It’s not about gay or straight. It’s about people.”
Meyer says the Complex has become more diverse over time. He estimates that 50 percent of his staff is straight, and the gay-to-straight breakdown of the crowd at Complex is 60 percent to 40 percent.
Meyer says the Complex is doing well, although the club now operates only Friday through Sunday. It previously was also open on a couple of weeknights.
“We’re doing great, new things to make it better, including theme parties every Friday night for 18-and-up and guest DJs on Saturdays,” he says.
“We’re a destination place, so we have to lure them here and make them stay here and have fun.”
As for that long-running talk that St. Louis University will take over the building housing the Complex and Chill, it remains just that: talk.
“I get calls all the time asking how long are we going to be open, and this has gone on for 15 years,” he says. “But I haven’t seen a check or a contract yet. But everything is for sale for a price. Daddy can always take the children somewhere else.”
Chill is open 4 p.m.-10 p.m. Monday and 4 p.m.-3 a.m. Tuesday-Sunday, with a 4 p.m.-7 p.m. happy hour. There is no cover.
Get more information at www.complexnightclub.com."
"St. Louis has another new place to play it cool.
It’s called Chill, at 3515 Chouteau Avenue in the same building the Complex, a long-running dance club.
Chill is very different than the thumping Complex upstairs.
“While you’re down here, you’re away from all the hoopla,” says Howard Meyer, who owns both spots. “You don’t have to see any of the Complex to come here.”
The quieter Chill, a “happy hour lounge,” has darts, an Internet jukebox, frozen cocktails, cheap drinks, a coffee bar and free happy hour food that includes everything from sloppy Joes to nachos.
It also has a light menu with handcrafted personal pizzas, Big Gus’ pretzels and more.
Chill opened quietly Dec. 29 but has a grand opening scheduled for Monday. The event is a benefit for Stray Rescue of St. Louis.
“It’s going to be huge,” Meyer says. The grand gpening will include free appetizers.
Prior to opening as Chill, the space was Trade, a rock ’n’ roll bar that lasted only a short time last year.
“The space was just sitting, and I said I have too many friends, so I might as well create an environment they could enjoy,” Meyer says.
Chill is being promoted as more mainstream than the Complex, which targets gays and lesbians, including female impersonator shows hosted by Dieta Pepsi on Sunday nights.
“We want a hugely diverse population with husbands and wives, single women and professionals, along with gays and lesbians,” he says. “It’s not about gay or straight. It’s about people.”
Meyer says the Complex has become more diverse over time. He estimates that 50 percent of his staff is straight, and the gay-to-straight breakdown of the crowd at Complex is 60 percent to 40 percent.
Meyer says the Complex is doing well, although the club now operates only Friday through Sunday. It previously was also open on a couple of weeknights.
“We’re doing great, new things to make it better, including theme parties every Friday night for 18-and-up and guest DJs on Saturdays,” he says.
“We’re a destination place, so we have to lure them here and make them stay here and have fun.”
As for that long-running talk that St. Louis University will take over the building housing the Complex and Chill, it remains just that: talk.
“I get calls all the time asking how long are we going to be open, and this has gone on for 15 years,” he says. “But I haven’t seen a check or a contract yet. But everything is for sale for a price. Daddy can always take the children somewhere else.”
Chill is open 4 p.m.-10 p.m. Monday and 4 p.m.-3 a.m. Tuesday-Sunday, with a 4 p.m.-7 p.m. happy hour. There is no cover.
Get more information at www.complexnightclub.com."
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life
From Boston Globe:
Last call
Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life
By Robert David Sullivan | December 2, 2007
THE FIRST THING I ever did to identify myself as a gay man - before coming out to a friend or relative, before putting a rainbow-flag pin on my jacket - was to walk into a gay bar. This was not so unusual in the early 1990s, when few gay men identified as such before they left high school. Some of us needed to walk around the block four or five times before finally pushing open a dimly lit, unmarked door.
At the time, there were plenty of dimly lit doors in Boston. The Napoleon Club was a piano bar near Park Square that attracted theater students and older men who left big tips on small glasses of red wine. A few blocks away, Luxor was a video bar for younger guys; nearby were Buddies (all ages) and Chaps, a dance club where dressing conservatively meant keeping your shirt on. In other parts of town, there were Sporters, a friendly Beacon Hill dive, and Playland, a Combat Zone bar known for its sketchy clientele, banged-up piano, and year-round Christmas lights. In all, there were 16 gay bars in Boston and Cambridge, according to Pink Pages directories from 1993 and 1994.
Today, that number has been cut to less than half. None of the bars I've mentioned are still in business, and most of the city's seven remaining gay-every-night bars have sparse customers for most of the week. (Lesbian bars were never numerous to begin with.) The gay population may have political clout and the right to marry in Massachusetts, but it has fewer and fewer public spaces to call its own.
The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed "blissful public congregation," as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book "The Great Good Place."
In New York, the Jewish deli - a staple of the city's identity - has all but vanished. In the Boston area, many of Harvard Square's bookstores, Kenmore Square's student eateries, and myriad other places that guaranteed a diverse urban experience have closed their doors, replaced by a far more uniform lineup of bank branches, chain stores, and upscale restaurants.
This change is a serious challenge to the city, which has historically been defined by the breadth and variety of its street-level experience - and the wide diversity of people it threw together. "City air makes free," a saying that dates to medieval times, was a favorite of urban-studies pioneer Jane Jacobs. But as a wide range of gay bars dwindles to a handful of survivors - and the city's diners, indie bookstores, and dive bars yield to high rents and shifting patterns of commerce - that air is becoming the province of an increasingly narrow set of people.
Oldenburg calls public gathering spots a "third place" where we can temporarily step out of our household and workplace roles. Besides taverns, he cites drugstores (the kind with soda fountains), pool halls, and barber shops as examples. But if you were a gay man in the late 20th century, the place with all the qualities of an ideal third space was the gay bar.
For many closeted gays, bars were the only places where they could safely be themselves. They were also a nexus for political organizing and charitable work, they promoted safer-sex education after the onset of AIDS, and they served as a welcome mat for gay newcomers to a city.
"When I was in college, I'd go out to a few different bars with my friends every week," says gay novelist Wayne Hoffman, who came to Boston in the late '80s and now lives in New York. "It was a chance for us to socialize off campus, meet new people - including new boyfriends - and figure out how we fit into the larger gay world. The bars opened up a whole world of possibilities for me."
For decades gay bars kept a low profile (unmarked doors, blackened windows), and were often run by mobsters or underworld figures, since more respectable businessmen weren't crazy about the prospect of frequent police raids. The general population was either unaware of them or saw them as sinister.
But in 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a rather boisterous Greenwich Village bar, and the gay patrons unexpectedly fought back. The resulting riot helped to turn bars into flag-bearers for gay culture, and "Stonewall" itself began to be used in the names of gay and lesbian political organizations (the Stonewall Democrats, for example) as shorthand for "don't push us around."
When gays moved out of the shadows during the '70s, then began settling in certain areas of major cities (like the South End in Boston), gay bars evolved. Some became respected neighborhood institutions, offering meeting space to social groups, sponsoring softball teams and arts festivals, distributing condoms and health information, and buying ads in local newspapers. By the mid-1980s, they were a major force in turning Gay Pride holidays into citywide celebrations, sponsoring eye-catching parade floats and raucous block parties.
But at the same time, larger trends in American life were massing that would soon sweep these bars away.
One was the rising price of urban real estate. Gay bars traditionally appeared in marginal neighborhoods, or in predominately gay neighborhoods, with cheap rents and accommodating (or indifferent) neighbors. As those areas have progressively been developed with high-end housing, bars have struggled to pay their rent, and neighborhood groups have been increasingly hostile toward anything that creates noise or attracts idlers. The same forces have stripped such neighborhoods of other iconic businesses, such as fringe theaters and free and low-admission art spaces.
Meanwhile, the gay population is becoming more dispersed. As gay men feel more comfortable coming out to family, neighbors, and co-workers, they may also feel more comfortable living in small cities or towns rather than in the "gay ghettos" of large cities. As a result, it's much harder for a neighborhood gay bar to attract a steady clientele.
Perhaps the most important change, however, is the Internet. When Internet access became widespread in the mid-1990s, gay chat rooms on America Online and other subscription services quickly attracted a crowd. More elaborate sites such as Gay.com quickly followed, usurping gay bars' most important function: a place for men to meet each other.
At the time of the Stonewall riots, "gay people had to go out to a bar to meet other gay men," at least if they didn't want to go to more dangerous cruising areas such as parks and men's rooms, says Michael Bronski, Dartmouth College professor and author of "The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom."
There are several gay chat sites where a month's membership can cost as little as the price of one cocktail at Club Cafe - and on a recent Saturday night, one of them listed nearly 600 Boston-area members online. The site claims 600,000 members nationwide.
As a result of these changes, there are stories of gay bars closing all over the country. Since the early '90s, New York has lost its two biggest leather bars (the Spike and the Lure), as well as piano bars (the Five Oaks and Pegasus) and martini lounges (the popular but short-lived Hell). In Laguna Beach, Calif., the first city in America to elect an openly gay mayor, one of the two biggest gay bars closed this spring, and the other has been purchased by a developer who wants to tear it down. And the oldest gay bar in Pittsburgh (ironically, the setting for the TV series "Queer as Folk") closed earlier this year, after Carnegie Mellon University purchased its building.
Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of "the long tail." That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Thanks to Cambridge's concentration of intellectual shoppers, for instance, Harvard Square had stores full of the most obscure books, magazines, and records you could think of buying. The students in Kenmore Square kept cheap eateries, music clubs, and record stores alive; the South End's gay population once supported not just bars, but also inexpensive card-and-gift shops (such as Tommy Tish), a sex-toy shop with the feel of an old-fashioned general store (the Marquis de Sade), and a gay bookstore.
Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles - including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive.
Businesses like bookstores, video stores, and gay bars can no longer afford to occupy valuable real estate when their goods or services are more easily and cheaply delivered electronically. As these businesses disappear from Boston streets, they're usually replaced by more profitable land uses, such as office towers and high-end restaurants. The result is a variant of the "tragedy of the commons": Hotels, condo complexes, and other upscale businesses market themselves as part of a vibrant city, but they can also make it more difficult to maintain that vibrancy. (The ground floors of new office and housing buildings are often reserved for retail use, but CVS and other chain stores usually snap up the space.) These high-end businesses attract new residents and consumers to urban neighborhoods, but when they aren't balanced by other types of economic activity, the result can be a sterile streetscape rather than a diverse ecosystem.
This development would have disappointed William H. Whyte, the sociologist who may be rivaled only by Jane Jacobs in the cogency and passion of his arguments for active city life. Albert LaFarge, editor of "The Essential William H. Whyte," says that the ideal urban neighborhood from Whyte's point of view is fueled by "the intensity and unpredictability of different people using the same space for their own reasons, and often contradictory ones, but all respecting the goals of vibrancy and function."
If a place like the South End accommodates fewer and fewer of these reasons for a person to be there, says LaFarge, it not longer meets the definition of a successful urban neighborhood.
Gay neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco are reportedly undergoing the same transformation as in the South End, but there is at least one exception to this trend. In Philadelphia, the city has encouraged the development of its "Gayborhood," a nine-block part of downtown, by adding rainbow flags to street signs, and the city's tourism board has an aggressive campaign targeted at gay travelers. Jeff Guaracino of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. says that the Gayborhood provides "a very good economic return for the city. Businesses are making a profit there."
Making a profit, of course, isn't always the same as serving a community's needs. Gay bars seem to be doing well in resort areas such as Palm Springs and Provincetown, but they're more vacation party spots than true third spaces for locals.
The fate of the Jewish delicatessen in New York is a reminder that "theme park" gay bars would be no substitute for what we've lost in Boston. Thousands of delis have disappeared from New York since the 1930s. Many of the dozen or so survivors seem to be thriving, but the tourist-oriented Carnegie and Stage delis, with their long lines and rapid turnover of tables, don't bear much resemblance to the classic model. At a panel discussion called "Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli," held this summer and reported on by The New York Times, food historian Joel Denker described the delis of the '50s and '60s as having "this sort of yeasty combination of intellectuals, writers, and leftists, sitting together over tea and cottage cheese and fruit, talking about the issues of the day."
Sitting and talking for hours at a time. Sadly, that's not considered an efficient use of space during today's supposed revival of city life.
Boston's gay community is adapting to its scaled-down bar scene, but there's still a sense of something missing. There are probably more spiritual groups, youth programs, and health resources than ever in the gay community, but none of them really fit the definition of a third space where one can drop in and hang out. "There was a whole group of friends who I would only ever see at the Napoleon Club," says Rick Park, a Boston-based actor, "and when it closed, they all disappeared."
You can see the change for the worse in the city's annual Gay Pride celebration. Years ago, the highlights of the parade were the outrageous parade floats, featuring drag queens and go-go boys, sponsored by gay bars. Now those delightfully pointless displays are outnumbered by contingents of waving employees from banks and utility companies in matching T-shirts. It's a positive development that so many people are out at work, to be sure, but the parade has become a lot less fun for gay and straight spectators alike.
A few weeks ago I attended a panel discussion sponsored by the History Project, which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history. A lesbian of a certain age, reflecting on the changes in the gay community since the Stonewall rebellion, said with rueful irony that "life may be easier now, but it might have been more exciting then."
That sounded a little bit like Red Sox fans complaining that they liked watching the team more when it was laboring under an 86-year curse. But I knew what she was talking about. So does Abe Rybeck, artistic director of the gay-themed Theater Offensive. He no longer considers himself a bar regular - there's too much to do running a theater company and participating in other activities - but he says that he would feel their disappearance.
"I went to Fritz to watch a World Series game this year," he says, "and it was fun to be in a room with a bunch of gay men enjoying a sports event in the way gay men would. In their minds, they were all going home with Jacoby Ellsbury. I was glad I could watch the game with my people."
Robert David Sullivan is the managing editor of CommonWealth magazine and primary writer of the blog Beyond Red & Blue (at massinc.org). The History Project (historyproject.org), which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history, provided much of the information in this article.
Last call
Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life
By Robert David Sullivan | December 2, 2007
THE FIRST THING I ever did to identify myself as a gay man - before coming out to a friend or relative, before putting a rainbow-flag pin on my jacket - was to walk into a gay bar. This was not so unusual in the early 1990s, when few gay men identified as such before they left high school. Some of us needed to walk around the block four or five times before finally pushing open a dimly lit, unmarked door.
At the time, there were plenty of dimly lit doors in Boston. The Napoleon Club was a piano bar near Park Square that attracted theater students and older men who left big tips on small glasses of red wine. A few blocks away, Luxor was a video bar for younger guys; nearby were Buddies (all ages) and Chaps, a dance club where dressing conservatively meant keeping your shirt on. In other parts of town, there were Sporters, a friendly Beacon Hill dive, and Playland, a Combat Zone bar known for its sketchy clientele, banged-up piano, and year-round Christmas lights. In all, there were 16 gay bars in Boston and Cambridge, according to Pink Pages directories from 1993 and 1994.
Today, that number has been cut to less than half. None of the bars I've mentioned are still in business, and most of the city's seven remaining gay-every-night bars have sparse customers for most of the week. (Lesbian bars were never numerous to begin with.) The gay population may have political clout and the right to marry in Massachusetts, but it has fewer and fewer public spaces to call its own.
The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed "blissful public congregation," as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book "The Great Good Place."
In New York, the Jewish deli - a staple of the city's identity - has all but vanished. In the Boston area, many of Harvard Square's bookstores, Kenmore Square's student eateries, and myriad other places that guaranteed a diverse urban experience have closed their doors, replaced by a far more uniform lineup of bank branches, chain stores, and upscale restaurants.
This change is a serious challenge to the city, which has historically been defined by the breadth and variety of its street-level experience - and the wide diversity of people it threw together. "City air makes free," a saying that dates to medieval times, was a favorite of urban-studies pioneer Jane Jacobs. But as a wide range of gay bars dwindles to a handful of survivors - and the city's diners, indie bookstores, and dive bars yield to high rents and shifting patterns of commerce - that air is becoming the province of an increasingly narrow set of people.
Oldenburg calls public gathering spots a "third place" where we can temporarily step out of our household and workplace roles. Besides taverns, he cites drugstores (the kind with soda fountains), pool halls, and barber shops as examples. But if you were a gay man in the late 20th century, the place with all the qualities of an ideal third space was the gay bar.
For many closeted gays, bars were the only places where they could safely be themselves. They were also a nexus for political organizing and charitable work, they promoted safer-sex education after the onset of AIDS, and they served as a welcome mat for gay newcomers to a city.
"When I was in college, I'd go out to a few different bars with my friends every week," says gay novelist Wayne Hoffman, who came to Boston in the late '80s and now lives in New York. "It was a chance for us to socialize off campus, meet new people - including new boyfriends - and figure out how we fit into the larger gay world. The bars opened up a whole world of possibilities for me."
For decades gay bars kept a low profile (unmarked doors, blackened windows), and were often run by mobsters or underworld figures, since more respectable businessmen weren't crazy about the prospect of frequent police raids. The general population was either unaware of them or saw them as sinister.
But in 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a rather boisterous Greenwich Village bar, and the gay patrons unexpectedly fought back. The resulting riot helped to turn bars into flag-bearers for gay culture, and "Stonewall" itself began to be used in the names of gay and lesbian political organizations (the Stonewall Democrats, for example) as shorthand for "don't push us around."
When gays moved out of the shadows during the '70s, then began settling in certain areas of major cities (like the South End in Boston), gay bars evolved. Some became respected neighborhood institutions, offering meeting space to social groups, sponsoring softball teams and arts festivals, distributing condoms and health information, and buying ads in local newspapers. By the mid-1980s, they were a major force in turning Gay Pride holidays into citywide celebrations, sponsoring eye-catching parade floats and raucous block parties.
But at the same time, larger trends in American life were massing that would soon sweep these bars away.
One was the rising price of urban real estate. Gay bars traditionally appeared in marginal neighborhoods, or in predominately gay neighborhoods, with cheap rents and accommodating (or indifferent) neighbors. As those areas have progressively been developed with high-end housing, bars have struggled to pay their rent, and neighborhood groups have been increasingly hostile toward anything that creates noise or attracts idlers. The same forces have stripped such neighborhoods of other iconic businesses, such as fringe theaters and free and low-admission art spaces.
Meanwhile, the gay population is becoming more dispersed. As gay men feel more comfortable coming out to family, neighbors, and co-workers, they may also feel more comfortable living in small cities or towns rather than in the "gay ghettos" of large cities. As a result, it's much harder for a neighborhood gay bar to attract a steady clientele.
Perhaps the most important change, however, is the Internet. When Internet access became widespread in the mid-1990s, gay chat rooms on America Online and other subscription services quickly attracted a crowd. More elaborate sites such as Gay.com quickly followed, usurping gay bars' most important function: a place for men to meet each other.
At the time of the Stonewall riots, "gay people had to go out to a bar to meet other gay men," at least if they didn't want to go to more dangerous cruising areas such as parks and men's rooms, says Michael Bronski, Dartmouth College professor and author of "The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom."
There are several gay chat sites where a month's membership can cost as little as the price of one cocktail at Club Cafe - and on a recent Saturday night, one of them listed nearly 600 Boston-area members online. The site claims 600,000 members nationwide.
As a result of these changes, there are stories of gay bars closing all over the country. Since the early '90s, New York has lost its two biggest leather bars (the Spike and the Lure), as well as piano bars (the Five Oaks and Pegasus) and martini lounges (the popular but short-lived Hell). In Laguna Beach, Calif., the first city in America to elect an openly gay mayor, one of the two biggest gay bars closed this spring, and the other has been purchased by a developer who wants to tear it down. And the oldest gay bar in Pittsburgh (ironically, the setting for the TV series "Queer as Folk") closed earlier this year, after Carnegie Mellon University purchased its building.
Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of "the long tail." That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Thanks to Cambridge's concentration of intellectual shoppers, for instance, Harvard Square had stores full of the most obscure books, magazines, and records you could think of buying. The students in Kenmore Square kept cheap eateries, music clubs, and record stores alive; the South End's gay population once supported not just bars, but also inexpensive card-and-gift shops (such as Tommy Tish), a sex-toy shop with the feel of an old-fashioned general store (the Marquis de Sade), and a gay bookstore.
Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles - including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive.
Businesses like bookstores, video stores, and gay bars can no longer afford to occupy valuable real estate when their goods or services are more easily and cheaply delivered electronically. As these businesses disappear from Boston streets, they're usually replaced by more profitable land uses, such as office towers and high-end restaurants. The result is a variant of the "tragedy of the commons": Hotels, condo complexes, and other upscale businesses market themselves as part of a vibrant city, but they can also make it more difficult to maintain that vibrancy. (The ground floors of new office and housing buildings are often reserved for retail use, but CVS and other chain stores usually snap up the space.) These high-end businesses attract new residents and consumers to urban neighborhoods, but when they aren't balanced by other types of economic activity, the result can be a sterile streetscape rather than a diverse ecosystem.
This development would have disappointed William H. Whyte, the sociologist who may be rivaled only by Jane Jacobs in the cogency and passion of his arguments for active city life. Albert LaFarge, editor of "The Essential William H. Whyte," says that the ideal urban neighborhood from Whyte's point of view is fueled by "the intensity and unpredictability of different people using the same space for their own reasons, and often contradictory ones, but all respecting the goals of vibrancy and function."
If a place like the South End accommodates fewer and fewer of these reasons for a person to be there, says LaFarge, it not longer meets the definition of a successful urban neighborhood.
Gay neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco are reportedly undergoing the same transformation as in the South End, but there is at least one exception to this trend. In Philadelphia, the city has encouraged the development of its "Gayborhood," a nine-block part of downtown, by adding rainbow flags to street signs, and the city's tourism board has an aggressive campaign targeted at gay travelers. Jeff Guaracino of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. says that the Gayborhood provides "a very good economic return for the city. Businesses are making a profit there."
Making a profit, of course, isn't always the same as serving a community's needs. Gay bars seem to be doing well in resort areas such as Palm Springs and Provincetown, but they're more vacation party spots than true third spaces for locals.
The fate of the Jewish delicatessen in New York is a reminder that "theme park" gay bars would be no substitute for what we've lost in Boston. Thousands of delis have disappeared from New York since the 1930s. Many of the dozen or so survivors seem to be thriving, but the tourist-oriented Carnegie and Stage delis, with their long lines and rapid turnover of tables, don't bear much resemblance to the classic model. At a panel discussion called "Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli," held this summer and reported on by The New York Times, food historian Joel Denker described the delis of the '50s and '60s as having "this sort of yeasty combination of intellectuals, writers, and leftists, sitting together over tea and cottage cheese and fruit, talking about the issues of the day."
Sitting and talking for hours at a time. Sadly, that's not considered an efficient use of space during today's supposed revival of city life.
Boston's gay community is adapting to its scaled-down bar scene, but there's still a sense of something missing. There are probably more spiritual groups, youth programs, and health resources than ever in the gay community, but none of them really fit the definition of a third space where one can drop in and hang out. "There was a whole group of friends who I would only ever see at the Napoleon Club," says Rick Park, a Boston-based actor, "and when it closed, they all disappeared."
You can see the change for the worse in the city's annual Gay Pride celebration. Years ago, the highlights of the parade were the outrageous parade floats, featuring drag queens and go-go boys, sponsored by gay bars. Now those delightfully pointless displays are outnumbered by contingents of waving employees from banks and utility companies in matching T-shirts. It's a positive development that so many people are out at work, to be sure, but the parade has become a lot less fun for gay and straight spectators alike.
A few weeks ago I attended a panel discussion sponsored by the History Project, which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history. A lesbian of a certain age, reflecting on the changes in the gay community since the Stonewall rebellion, said with rueful irony that "life may be easier now, but it might have been more exciting then."
That sounded a little bit like Red Sox fans complaining that they liked watching the team more when it was laboring under an 86-year curse. But I knew what she was talking about. So does Abe Rybeck, artistic director of the gay-themed Theater Offensive. He no longer considers himself a bar regular - there's too much to do running a theater company and participating in other activities - but he says that he would feel their disappearance.
"I went to Fritz to watch a World Series game this year," he says, "and it was fun to be in a room with a bunch of gay men enjoying a sports event in the way gay men would. In their minds, they were all going home with Jacoby Ellsbury. I was glad I could watch the game with my people."
Robert David Sullivan is the managing editor of CommonWealth magazine and primary writer of the blog Beyond Red & Blue (at massinc.org). The History Project (historyproject.org), which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history, provided much of the information in this article.
NYC's Roxy Closed 6 Weeks Before We Closed Faces
Kind of interesting...we closed Faces in April 2007.
From Advocate.com:
NYC bids farewell to gay hot spot the Roxy
Legendary New York City club the Roxy had its final hurrah Saturday night, March 10, 2007 after 16 long years as the mecca of Manhattan's gay club land.
Saturday night's 14-hour farewell party, which lasted until noon Sunday, saw a reported 4,000 people and ended with a set by resident DJ Peter Rauhofer, who closed the party with Donna Summer's "Last Dance."
The club, which began as a roller-skating rink in the early 1980s, turned to a predominantly gay clientele in 1990 when it opened Lee Chappell and David Leigh's Locomotion party.
Since then, the Roxy has featured DJs Dmitri from Deee-Lite, Sister Dimension, Tennessee, Larry Tee, and Dynell. It has also featured international DJs including Junior Vasquez, Manny Lehman, Victor Calderone, and Peter Rauhofer.
The 6,000-square-foot venue hosted performances from Madonna, Cher, Bette Midler, and Beyoncé and celebrity guests Marc Jacobs, Elton John, Jean Paul Gaultier, Kate Pierson, Boy George, and Grace Jones.
When it reopened in 1990, the Roxy was described as a "gay lovefest" by drag superstar Lady Bunny, who recalls that New York's gay nightlife at the time had been devastated by AIDS.
"It became a beacon of celebration amid despair. People were ready to party again," she reminisced to The New York Times.
Clubgoer Terrence Cairy said of the Roxy, "Oh, my God, I had my coming-out party here 11 years ago. It's a safe place to come out, and it has the best DJs in the city."
Despite the glowing reviews, club promoter John Blair said he felt content about the passing of the club. "It was a phenomenon," Blair told Next Magazine. "It was the right people, the right place, and the right time. We can't just pluck it up and move it elsewhere. It's an exciting time for something new."
Amid wavering attendance in 2006, the Roxy closed for several weeks in the autumn and resumed December 2. It will eventually be demolished to pave way for a new apartment block. (Hassan Mirza, Gay.com/U.K.)
From Advocate.com:
NYC bids farewell to gay hot spot the Roxy
Legendary New York City club the Roxy had its final hurrah Saturday night, March 10, 2007 after 16 long years as the mecca of Manhattan's gay club land.
Saturday night's 14-hour farewell party, which lasted until noon Sunday, saw a reported 4,000 people and ended with a set by resident DJ Peter Rauhofer, who closed the party with Donna Summer's "Last Dance."
The club, which began as a roller-skating rink in the early 1980s, turned to a predominantly gay clientele in 1990 when it opened Lee Chappell and David Leigh's Locomotion party.
Since then, the Roxy has featured DJs Dmitri from Deee-Lite, Sister Dimension, Tennessee, Larry Tee, and Dynell. It has also featured international DJs including Junior Vasquez, Manny Lehman, Victor Calderone, and Peter Rauhofer.
The 6,000-square-foot venue hosted performances from Madonna, Cher, Bette Midler, and Beyoncé and celebrity guests Marc Jacobs, Elton John, Jean Paul Gaultier, Kate Pierson, Boy George, and Grace Jones.
When it reopened in 1990, the Roxy was described as a "gay lovefest" by drag superstar Lady Bunny, who recalls that New York's gay nightlife at the time had been devastated by AIDS.
"It became a beacon of celebration amid despair. People were ready to party again," she reminisced to The New York Times.
Clubgoer Terrence Cairy said of the Roxy, "Oh, my God, I had my coming-out party here 11 years ago. It's a safe place to come out, and it has the best DJs in the city."
Despite the glowing reviews, club promoter John Blair said he felt content about the passing of the club. "It was a phenomenon," Blair told Next Magazine. "It was the right people, the right place, and the right time. We can't just pluck it up and move it elsewhere. It's an exciting time for something new."
Amid wavering attendance in 2006, the Roxy closed for several weeks in the autumn and resumed December 2. It will eventually be demolished to pave way for a new apartment block. (Hassan Mirza, Gay.com/U.K.)
Landmark NYC Gay Bookstore Will Close
FRom NYT:
"February 3, 2009, 3:00 pm
Venerable Gay Bookstore Will Close
By Sewell Chan
The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, at 15 Christopher Street. (Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Updated, 4:12 p.m. | The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in Greenwich Village, which is believed to be the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the country, will close on March 29, its owner announced on Tuesday, citing “the current economic crisis.” The announcement came nearly six years after the store was about to close, only to be given a last-minute reprieve when a new owner bought it.
The store was opened in 1967 on Mercer Street by Craig L. Rodwell, who was influential in the gay rights movement. It later moved to 15 Christopher Street. Mr. Rodwell, who inspired similar owners of gay bookshops around the country, and who helped organize the city’s first gay pride parade in 1970, died of stomach cancer in 1993.
Then, a store manager, Bill Offenbaker, bought the store. A third owner, Larry Lingle, bought the store in 1996.
In 2003, after Mr. Lingle said he could no longer afford to keep the store open, Deacon Maccubbin, the owner of Lambda Rising Bookstores in Washington, agreed to buy the store and keep it afloat. Then, in 2006, Kim Brinster, the store’s manager since 1996, became the store’s fifth owner.
The bookstore, which currently occupies a storefront not much bigger than a typical Manhattan studio apartment, became a landmark institution for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.
Ms. Brinster wrote in an e-mail message to customers on Tuesday afternoon:
It is with a sorrowful heart that after 41 years in business the Oscar Wilde Bookshop will close its doors for the final time on March 29, 2009. We want to thank all of our customers for their love and loyalty to the store over the years. You have helped make this store a world wide destination and all of us at the store have enjoyed welcoming our neighbors whether they are next door or half way around the world.
In 1967 Craig Rodwell started this landmark store that not only sold Gay and Lesbian literature but also became a meeting place for the LGBT community. Over the years it grew into a first-rate bookshop thanks to the loyal, smart and dedicated staff. There are not enough words to thank these dedicated booksellers for making the OWB one of the world’s finest LGBT bookstores. I feel very honored to have gotten to work with them.
Unfortunately we do not have the resources to weather the current economic crisis and find it’s time to call it a day. So thanks to all who have been a part of the Oscar Wilde family over the years, you have truly been a part of a great global community.
The store said it would continue to take orders through e-mail and through its Web site until mid-March. Ms. Brinster said the store would extend special offers and discounts to liquidate its inventory.
“What a shame,” said Martin B. Duberman, an emeritus professor of history at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, when he heard of the store’s closing.
Professor Duberman knew the store’s founder, Mr. Rodwell, and wrote about him in his 1993 book “Stonewall.”
“Craig struggled very hard,” Professor Duberman recalled in a phone interview. “He had no real backing from other sources. It was pretty much always hand to mouth. In the early years, some people objected because he refused to carry any pornography. He eventually relented, though I can’t tell you how long it took, but I’m sure that helped him move from a marginal life to at least a semi-prosperous one.”
Professor Duberman called the store “clearly pioneering,” saying, “It demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to own a bookstore, however small, that catered to a gay public. At the same time, by its very existence, it helped to demonstrate that there was such a public, which in turn might well have had some influence on gay writers – suggesting that there was an outlet for that kind of work.”
The current owner, Ms. Brinster, who is 51, started as a manager at the store in 1996 when Mr. Lingle was the owner. Raised in Texas, she moved to New York City in 1979 to get a master’s degree in religious education at Fordham University and later worked as a letter carrier until moving into the book business.
In a phone interview, she said sales had declined by double-digit percentages, compared with a year ago, each month since August. On Tuesday, she noted, the store had only two paying customers.
“People are hemorrhaging, and we’re no exception,” she said. “People really are nervous.”
Ms. Brinster said the economy “is worse than it was after 9/11.”
Independent bookstores have faced relentless challenge from big retailers like Barnes & Noble and online book sellers like Amazon.com, and there is growing interest in electronic books. Ms. Brinster also estimated that some two-thirds of the store’s customers were foreign tourists, and said the decline in the value of the euro — and the general reduction in tourism — had hurt the store.
The store sits below two apartments and above a massage parlor. Ms. Brinster said she paid $3,000 a month in rent, which she said was already below market value.
“Even if we were rent-free it wouldn’t be enough for us to cover the bills we have,” she said. “This is one instance in New York where it’s not a case of the landlord gouging the tenant. Our landlord has always been remarkable with us.”
"February 3, 2009, 3:00 pm
Venerable Gay Bookstore Will Close
By Sewell Chan
The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, at 15 Christopher Street. (Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Updated, 4:12 p.m. | The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in Greenwich Village, which is believed to be the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the country, will close on March 29, its owner announced on Tuesday, citing “the current economic crisis.” The announcement came nearly six years after the store was about to close, only to be given a last-minute reprieve when a new owner bought it.
The store was opened in 1967 on Mercer Street by Craig L. Rodwell, who was influential in the gay rights movement. It later moved to 15 Christopher Street. Mr. Rodwell, who inspired similar owners of gay bookshops around the country, and who helped organize the city’s first gay pride parade in 1970, died of stomach cancer in 1993.
Then, a store manager, Bill Offenbaker, bought the store. A third owner, Larry Lingle, bought the store in 1996.
In 2003, after Mr. Lingle said he could no longer afford to keep the store open, Deacon Maccubbin, the owner of Lambda Rising Bookstores in Washington, agreed to buy the store and keep it afloat. Then, in 2006, Kim Brinster, the store’s manager since 1996, became the store’s fifth owner.
The bookstore, which currently occupies a storefront not much bigger than a typical Manhattan studio apartment, became a landmark institution for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.
Ms. Brinster wrote in an e-mail message to customers on Tuesday afternoon:
It is with a sorrowful heart that after 41 years in business the Oscar Wilde Bookshop will close its doors for the final time on March 29, 2009. We want to thank all of our customers for their love and loyalty to the store over the years. You have helped make this store a world wide destination and all of us at the store have enjoyed welcoming our neighbors whether they are next door or half way around the world.
In 1967 Craig Rodwell started this landmark store that not only sold Gay and Lesbian literature but also became a meeting place for the LGBT community. Over the years it grew into a first-rate bookshop thanks to the loyal, smart and dedicated staff. There are not enough words to thank these dedicated booksellers for making the OWB one of the world’s finest LGBT bookstores. I feel very honored to have gotten to work with them.
Unfortunately we do not have the resources to weather the current economic crisis and find it’s time to call it a day. So thanks to all who have been a part of the Oscar Wilde family over the years, you have truly been a part of a great global community.
The store said it would continue to take orders through e-mail and through its Web site until mid-March. Ms. Brinster said the store would extend special offers and discounts to liquidate its inventory.
“What a shame,” said Martin B. Duberman, an emeritus professor of history at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, when he heard of the store’s closing.
Professor Duberman knew the store’s founder, Mr. Rodwell, and wrote about him in his 1993 book “Stonewall.”
“Craig struggled very hard,” Professor Duberman recalled in a phone interview. “He had no real backing from other sources. It was pretty much always hand to mouth. In the early years, some people objected because he refused to carry any pornography. He eventually relented, though I can’t tell you how long it took, but I’m sure that helped him move from a marginal life to at least a semi-prosperous one.”
Professor Duberman called the store “clearly pioneering,” saying, “It demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to own a bookstore, however small, that catered to a gay public. At the same time, by its very existence, it helped to demonstrate that there was such a public, which in turn might well have had some influence on gay writers – suggesting that there was an outlet for that kind of work.”
The current owner, Ms. Brinster, who is 51, started as a manager at the store in 1996 when Mr. Lingle was the owner. Raised in Texas, she moved to New York City in 1979 to get a master’s degree in religious education at Fordham University and later worked as a letter carrier until moving into the book business.
In a phone interview, she said sales had declined by double-digit percentages, compared with a year ago, each month since August. On Tuesday, she noted, the store had only two paying customers.
“People are hemorrhaging, and we’re no exception,” she said. “People really are nervous.”
Ms. Brinster said the economy “is worse than it was after 9/11.”
Independent bookstores have faced relentless challenge from big retailers like Barnes & Noble and online book sellers like Amazon.com, and there is growing interest in electronic books. Ms. Brinster also estimated that some two-thirds of the store’s customers were foreign tourists, and said the decline in the value of the euro — and the general reduction in tourism — had hurt the store.
The store sits below two apartments and above a massage parlor. Ms. Brinster said she paid $3,000 a month in rent, which she said was already below market value.
“Even if we were rent-free it wouldn’t be enough for us to cover the bills we have,” she said. “This is one instance in New York where it’s not a case of the landlord gouging the tenant. Our landlord has always been remarkable with us.”
Sunday, January 04, 2009
You're likable enough, gay people
From NYT:
December 28, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
You’re Likable Enough, Gay People
By FRANK RICH
IN his first press conference after his re-election in 2004, President Bush memorably declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” We all know how that turned out.
Barack Obama has little in common with George W. Bush, thank God, his obsessive workouts and message control notwithstanding. At a time when very few Americans feel very good about very much, Obama is generating huge hopes even before he takes office. So much so that his name and face, affixed to any product, may be the last commodity left in the marketplace that can still move Americans to shop.
I share these high hopes. But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month.
As we saw during primary season, our president-elect is not free of his own brand of hubris and arrogance, and sometimes it comes before a fall: “You’re likable enough, Hillary” was the prelude to his defeat in New Hampshire. He has hit this same note again by assigning the invocation at his inauguration to the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County, Calif., megachurch preacher who has likened committed gay relationships to incest, polygamy and “an older guy marrying a child.” Bestowing this honor on Warren was a conscious — and glib — decision by Obama to spend political capital. It was made with the certitude that a leader with a mandate can do no wrong.
In this case, the capital spent is small change. Most Americans who have an opinion about Warren like him and his best-selling self-help tome, “The Purpose Driven Life.” His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change. He is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama. Unlike such family-values ayatollahs as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, Warren is not obsessed with homosexuality and abortion. He was vociferously attacked by the Phyllis Schlafly gang when he invited Obama to speak about AIDS at his Saddleback Church two years ago.
There’s no reason why Obama shouldn’t return the favor by inviting him to Washington. But there’s a difference between including Warren among the cacophony of voices weighing in on policy and anointing him as the inaugural’s de facto pope. You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face. “I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”
Warren, whose ego is no less than Obama’s, likes to advertise his “commitment to model civility in America.” But as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reminded her audience, “comparing gay relationships to child abuse” is a “strange model of civility.” Less strange but equally hard to take is Warren’s defensive insistence that some of his best friends are the gays: His boasts of having “eaten dinner in gay homes” and loving Melissa Etheridge records will not protect any gay families’ civil rights.
Equally lame is the argument mounted by an Obama spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, who talks of how Warren has fought for “people who have H.I.V./AIDS.” Shouldn’t that be the default position of any religious leader? Fighting AIDS is not a get-out-of-homophobia-free card. That Bush finally joined Bono in doing the right thing about AIDS in Africa does not mitigate the gay-baiting of his 2004 campaign, let alone his silence and utter inaction when the epidemic was killing Texans by the thousands, many of them gay men, during his term as governor.
Unlike Bush, Obama has been the vocal advocate of gay civil rights he claims to be. It is over the top to assert, as a gay writer at Time did, that the president-elect is “a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot.” Much more to the point is the astute criticism leveled by the gay Democratic congressman Barney Frank, who, in dissenting from the Warren choice, said of Obama, “I think he overestimates his ability to get people to put aside fundamental differences.” That’s a polite way of describing the Obama cockiness. It will take more than the force of the new president’s personality and eloquence to turn our nation into the United States of America he and we all want it to be.
Obama may not only overestimate his ability to bridge some of our fundamental differences but also underestimate how persistent some of those differences are. The exhilaration of his decisive election victory and the deserved applause that has greeted his mostly glitch-free transition can’t entirely mask the tensions underneath. Before there is profound social change, there is always high anxiety.
The success of Proposition 8 in California was a serious shock to gay Americans and to all the rest of us who believe that all marriages should be equal under the law. The roles played by African-Americans (who voted 70 percent in favor of Proposition 8) and by white Mormons (who were accused of bankrolling the anti-same-sex-marriage campaign) only added to the morning-after recriminations. And that was in blue California. In Arkansas, voters went so far as to approve a measure forbidding gay couples to adopt.
There is comparable anger and fear on the right. David Brody, a political correspondent with the Christian Broadcasting Network, was flooded with e-mails from religious conservatives chastising Warren for accepting the invitation to the inaugural. They vilified Obama as “pro-death” and worse because of his support for abortion rights.
Stoking this rage, no doubt, is the dawning realization that the old religious right is crumbling — in part because Warren’s new generation of leaders departs from the Falwell-Robertson brand of zealots who have had a stranglehold on the G.O.P. It’s a sign of the old establishment’s panic that the Rev. Richard Cizik, known for his leadership in addressing global warming, was pushed out of his executive post at the National Association of Evangelicals this month. Cizik’s sin was to tell Terry Gross of NPR that he was starting to shift in favor of civil unions for gay couples.
Cizik’s ouster won’t halt the new wave he represents. As he also told Gross, young evangelicals care less and less about the old wedge issues and aren’t as likely to base their votes on them. On gay rights in particular, polls show that young evangelicals are moving in Cizik’s (and the country’s) direction and away from what John McCain once rightly called “the agents of intolerance.” It’s not a coincidence that Dobson’s Focus on the Family, which spent more than $500,000 promoting Proposition 8, has now had to lay off 20 percent of its work force in Colorado Springs.
But we’re not there yet. Warren’s defamation of gay people illustrates why, as does our president-elect’s rationalization of it. When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.
It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears. “You’ve got to give them hope” was the refrain of the pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that hope has to mean action, not just words.
By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.
Since he’s not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama enthusiast who served on his campaign’s National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail on Christmas Eve.
After noting that Warren’s role at the inauguration is, in the end, symbolic, McCarthy concluded that “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” This means Warren should “recant his previous statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian.”
McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.” And “for LGBT folks to choose their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his policy-making, not on the character of his ministers.”
Amen. Here’s to humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top, as we negotiate the fierce rapids of change awaiting us in the New Year.
December 28, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
You’re Likable Enough, Gay People
By FRANK RICH
IN his first press conference after his re-election in 2004, President Bush memorably declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” We all know how that turned out.
Barack Obama has little in common with George W. Bush, thank God, his obsessive workouts and message control notwithstanding. At a time when very few Americans feel very good about very much, Obama is generating huge hopes even before he takes office. So much so that his name and face, affixed to any product, may be the last commodity left in the marketplace that can still move Americans to shop.
I share these high hopes. But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month.
As we saw during primary season, our president-elect is not free of his own brand of hubris and arrogance, and sometimes it comes before a fall: “You’re likable enough, Hillary” was the prelude to his defeat in New Hampshire. He has hit this same note again by assigning the invocation at his inauguration to the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County, Calif., megachurch preacher who has likened committed gay relationships to incest, polygamy and “an older guy marrying a child.” Bestowing this honor on Warren was a conscious — and glib — decision by Obama to spend political capital. It was made with the certitude that a leader with a mandate can do no wrong.
In this case, the capital spent is small change. Most Americans who have an opinion about Warren like him and his best-selling self-help tome, “The Purpose Driven Life.” His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change. He is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama. Unlike such family-values ayatollahs as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, Warren is not obsessed with homosexuality and abortion. He was vociferously attacked by the Phyllis Schlafly gang when he invited Obama to speak about AIDS at his Saddleback Church two years ago.
There’s no reason why Obama shouldn’t return the favor by inviting him to Washington. But there’s a difference between including Warren among the cacophony of voices weighing in on policy and anointing him as the inaugural’s de facto pope. You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face. “I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”
Warren, whose ego is no less than Obama’s, likes to advertise his “commitment to model civility in America.” But as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reminded her audience, “comparing gay relationships to child abuse” is a “strange model of civility.” Less strange but equally hard to take is Warren’s defensive insistence that some of his best friends are the gays: His boasts of having “eaten dinner in gay homes” and loving Melissa Etheridge records will not protect any gay families’ civil rights.
Equally lame is the argument mounted by an Obama spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, who talks of how Warren has fought for “people who have H.I.V./AIDS.” Shouldn’t that be the default position of any religious leader? Fighting AIDS is not a get-out-of-homophobia-free card. That Bush finally joined Bono in doing the right thing about AIDS in Africa does not mitigate the gay-baiting of his 2004 campaign, let alone his silence and utter inaction when the epidemic was killing Texans by the thousands, many of them gay men, during his term as governor.
Unlike Bush, Obama has been the vocal advocate of gay civil rights he claims to be. It is over the top to assert, as a gay writer at Time did, that the president-elect is “a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot.” Much more to the point is the astute criticism leveled by the gay Democratic congressman Barney Frank, who, in dissenting from the Warren choice, said of Obama, “I think he overestimates his ability to get people to put aside fundamental differences.” That’s a polite way of describing the Obama cockiness. It will take more than the force of the new president’s personality and eloquence to turn our nation into the United States of America he and we all want it to be.
Obama may not only overestimate his ability to bridge some of our fundamental differences but also underestimate how persistent some of those differences are. The exhilaration of his decisive election victory and the deserved applause that has greeted his mostly glitch-free transition can’t entirely mask the tensions underneath. Before there is profound social change, there is always high anxiety.
The success of Proposition 8 in California was a serious shock to gay Americans and to all the rest of us who believe that all marriages should be equal under the law. The roles played by African-Americans (who voted 70 percent in favor of Proposition 8) and by white Mormons (who were accused of bankrolling the anti-same-sex-marriage campaign) only added to the morning-after recriminations. And that was in blue California. In Arkansas, voters went so far as to approve a measure forbidding gay couples to adopt.
There is comparable anger and fear on the right. David Brody, a political correspondent with the Christian Broadcasting Network, was flooded with e-mails from religious conservatives chastising Warren for accepting the invitation to the inaugural. They vilified Obama as “pro-death” and worse because of his support for abortion rights.
Stoking this rage, no doubt, is the dawning realization that the old religious right is crumbling — in part because Warren’s new generation of leaders departs from the Falwell-Robertson brand of zealots who have had a stranglehold on the G.O.P. It’s a sign of the old establishment’s panic that the Rev. Richard Cizik, known for his leadership in addressing global warming, was pushed out of his executive post at the National Association of Evangelicals this month. Cizik’s sin was to tell Terry Gross of NPR that he was starting to shift in favor of civil unions for gay couples.
Cizik’s ouster won’t halt the new wave he represents. As he also told Gross, young evangelicals care less and less about the old wedge issues and aren’t as likely to base their votes on them. On gay rights in particular, polls show that young evangelicals are moving in Cizik’s (and the country’s) direction and away from what John McCain once rightly called “the agents of intolerance.” It’s not a coincidence that Dobson’s Focus on the Family, which spent more than $500,000 promoting Proposition 8, has now had to lay off 20 percent of its work force in Colorado Springs.
But we’re not there yet. Warren’s defamation of gay people illustrates why, as does our president-elect’s rationalization of it. When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.
It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears. “You’ve got to give them hope” was the refrain of the pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that hope has to mean action, not just words.
By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.
Since he’s not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama enthusiast who served on his campaign’s National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail on Christmas Eve.
After noting that Warren’s role at the inauguration is, in the end, symbolic, McCarthy concluded that “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” This means Warren should “recant his previous statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian.”
McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.” And “for LGBT folks to choose their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his policy-making, not on the character of his ministers.”
Amen. Here’s to humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top, as we negotiate the fierce rapids of change awaiting us in the New Year.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Washington Avenue Renaissance Hotel's Finances Deteriorate
From Stltoday.com on December 19, 2008:
The Renaissance Hotel is experiencing even worse financial results than officials projected a month ago, general manager Robert Bray told bondholders recently. His comments are contained in a disclosure document filed this week by UMB Bank, the hotel’s bond trustee.
The hotel notified bondholders earlier that it wouldn’t be able to make an interest payment that was due Dec. 15. In fact, it is only paying $500,000 of the $3.5 million in interest that was due. Bray’s note says that the shortfall grew by $160,000 since November “as we saw group conference attendance deterioration and cancellations account for a decline of more than 1,300 room nights.”
Other gloomy numbers: The hotel will fall $2.6 million short of being able to make its June interest payment, which also is $3.5 million. That projection is $200,000 worse than what hotel officials reported a month ago. The Renaissance now expects occupancy to be 58.7 percent next year, down from the 60 percent figure in its earlier budget. And a capital fund for replacing furniture, fixtures and equipment is $9 million short of where it should be.
In other news from the filing, Steven Stogel is once again involved as an intermediary trying to find a permanent solution to the hotel’s financial problems. The St. Louis developer helped structure the original financing, and he worked on a restructuring for more than two years before bowing out this summer. At the time, it looked like the hotel’s developer, Historic Restoration Inc., was going to take full ownership and bring in new capital. Then the credit crunch and the worsening economy pushed the hotel to where it is now, in default.
The Renaissance Hotel is experiencing even worse financial results than officials projected a month ago, general manager Robert Bray told bondholders recently. His comments are contained in a disclosure document filed this week by UMB Bank, the hotel’s bond trustee.
The hotel notified bondholders earlier that it wouldn’t be able to make an interest payment that was due Dec. 15. In fact, it is only paying $500,000 of the $3.5 million in interest that was due. Bray’s note says that the shortfall grew by $160,000 since November “as we saw group conference attendance deterioration and cancellations account for a decline of more than 1,300 room nights.”
Other gloomy numbers: The hotel will fall $2.6 million short of being able to make its June interest payment, which also is $3.5 million. That projection is $200,000 worse than what hotel officials reported a month ago. The Renaissance now expects occupancy to be 58.7 percent next year, down from the 60 percent figure in its earlier budget. And a capital fund for replacing furniture, fixtures and equipment is $9 million short of where it should be.
In other news from the filing, Steven Stogel is once again involved as an intermediary trying to find a permanent solution to the hotel’s financial problems. The St. Louis developer helped structure the original financing, and he worked on a restructuring for more than two years before bowing out this summer. At the time, it looked like the hotel’s developer, Historic Restoration Inc., was going to take full ownership and bring in new capital. Then the credit crunch and the worsening economy pushed the hotel to where it is now, in default.
St. Louis burned by corporate takeovers; sale of A-B, mergers and layoffs hurt city
From Belleville.com on January 2, 2009:
Over the last decade or so, St. Louis has seen the loss of many major corporate headquarters to buyouts and mergers -- McDonnell Douglas, TWA, May Department Stores Co., A.G. Edwards, Pulitzer Publishing.
But none stung as bad as 2008. Budweiser is now in Belgian hands.
The $52 billion sale of iconic St. Louis brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. to InBev SA highlighted what was an overall difficult year for business in Missouri. InBev agreed to make St. Louis its North American headquarters, but the merger has already taken a toll -- 1,400 Anheuser-Busch workers, about 1,000 of them in St. Louis, saw their jobs eliminated 2 1/2 weeks before Christmas.
The merger makes Anheuser-Busch InBev the world's largest beer-maker. The Brussels-based company promised to continue Anheuser-Busch's long tradition of community involvement and corporate giving. Budweiser, Bud Light and other beers still pour from taps around the city. The Cardinals still play at the ballpark known as Busch Stadium.
But it just isn't the same in St. Louis.
The job cuts at Anheuser-Busch were part of an effort to streamline costs and eliminate duplication of post-merger jobs. The company said the job losses will help it save at least $1.5 billion a year by 2011 and cope with a "challenging economy."
Around the state, many firms are dealing with similar challenges.
The state's unemployment rate reached 6.5 percent. In suburban St. Louis, Chrysler shut down one of its two plants, citing decreasing sales of minivans. The plant employed 3,000 people in 2007. Now, it employs about 100.
The auto industry cuts have rippled through suppliers and other businesses. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said 225,000 jobs in Missouri alone are connected to the auto industry.
Anheuser-Busch-InBev wasn't the only company cutting jobs in the weeks before Christmas. St. Louis-based Furniture Brands International Inc. said it would eliminate 1,400 jobs, or 15 percent of its work force. Another St. Louis company, electronics component maker Belden Inc., announced 1,800 job cuts worldwide, or 20 percent of its total, citing softening demand.
Jobs were being slashed at places where layoffs are infrequent. In January 20008, H&R Block Inc. announced plans to eliminate more than 500 corporate positions, most of them at its headquarters in Kansas City. In October, the nation's largest car rental company, St. Louis-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car, laid off 200 workers, the first mass layoff ever for the 51-year-old company.
The sour economy and declining advertising revenue continued to haunt media companies. The Kansas City Star cut 120 jobs in June and 50 more in November. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch laid off 31 workers in March and 20 more in September. Layoffs also hit newspapers in Kansas City, Springfield and Joplin.
Small towns weren't immune. Tiny Clarksville in northeast Missouri, with fewer than 500 people, is taking a big hit with the loss of 180 jobs at the Holcim Inc. cement plant. In the Bootheel region, Noranda Aluminum is cutting 228 jobs by early next year at its New Madrid plant. Clothing-maker Thorngate Ltd. cut 250 jobs in Cape Girardeau.
St. Louis-based Ameristar Casinos Inc., cut its nationwide work force by 4.5 percent, including casino workers in St. Charles and Kansas City.
But there was good news for Missouri's 12 casinos. Revenue was up 9 percent overall in November compared to a year ago, despite the sluggish economy. And in November, voters passed Proposition A, ending the state's $500 loss limit. The measure also capped the number of new casinos allowed in the state and raised taxes on existing ones.
© 2007 Belleville News-Democrat and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.belleville.com
Over the last decade or so, St. Louis has seen the loss of many major corporate headquarters to buyouts and mergers -- McDonnell Douglas, TWA, May Department Stores Co., A.G. Edwards, Pulitzer Publishing.
But none stung as bad as 2008. Budweiser is now in Belgian hands.
The $52 billion sale of iconic St. Louis brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. to InBev SA highlighted what was an overall difficult year for business in Missouri. InBev agreed to make St. Louis its North American headquarters, but the merger has already taken a toll -- 1,400 Anheuser-Busch workers, about 1,000 of them in St. Louis, saw their jobs eliminated 2 1/2 weeks before Christmas.
The merger makes Anheuser-Busch InBev the world's largest beer-maker. The Brussels-based company promised to continue Anheuser-Busch's long tradition of community involvement and corporate giving. Budweiser, Bud Light and other beers still pour from taps around the city. The Cardinals still play at the ballpark known as Busch Stadium.
But it just isn't the same in St. Louis.
The job cuts at Anheuser-Busch were part of an effort to streamline costs and eliminate duplication of post-merger jobs. The company said the job losses will help it save at least $1.5 billion a year by 2011 and cope with a "challenging economy."
Around the state, many firms are dealing with similar challenges.
The state's unemployment rate reached 6.5 percent. In suburban St. Louis, Chrysler shut down one of its two plants, citing decreasing sales of minivans. The plant employed 3,000 people in 2007. Now, it employs about 100.
The auto industry cuts have rippled through suppliers and other businesses. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said 225,000 jobs in Missouri alone are connected to the auto industry.
Anheuser-Busch-InBev wasn't the only company cutting jobs in the weeks before Christmas. St. Louis-based Furniture Brands International Inc. said it would eliminate 1,400 jobs, or 15 percent of its work force. Another St. Louis company, electronics component maker Belden Inc., announced 1,800 job cuts worldwide, or 20 percent of its total, citing softening demand.
Jobs were being slashed at places where layoffs are infrequent. In January 20008, H&R Block Inc. announced plans to eliminate more than 500 corporate positions, most of them at its headquarters in Kansas City. In October, the nation's largest car rental company, St. Louis-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car, laid off 200 workers, the first mass layoff ever for the 51-year-old company.
The sour economy and declining advertising revenue continued to haunt media companies. The Kansas City Star cut 120 jobs in June and 50 more in November. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch laid off 31 workers in March and 20 more in September. Layoffs also hit newspapers in Kansas City, Springfield and Joplin.
Small towns weren't immune. Tiny Clarksville in northeast Missouri, with fewer than 500 people, is taking a big hit with the loss of 180 jobs at the Holcim Inc. cement plant. In the Bootheel region, Noranda Aluminum is cutting 228 jobs by early next year at its New Madrid plant. Clothing-maker Thorngate Ltd. cut 250 jobs in Cape Girardeau.
St. Louis-based Ameristar Casinos Inc., cut its nationwide work force by 4.5 percent, including casino workers in St. Charles and Kansas City.
But there was good news for Missouri's 12 casinos. Revenue was up 9 percent overall in November compared to a year ago, despite the sluggish economy. And in November, voters passed Proposition A, ending the state's $500 loss limit. The measure also capped the number of new casinos allowed in the state and raised taxes on existing ones.
© 2007 Belleville News-Democrat and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.belleville.com
Year old Illinois Smoking Ban Hurts Bars and Casinos
From Belleville.com on January 1, 2009:
By David Mercer
Walt Karstens stood inside his 74-year-old wood-frame bar in Moline counting his customers, and the empty seats he says would have been filled a year ago.
About a dozen regulars had checked in at Casey's Tavern by late afternoon on New Year's Eve, roughly half the number the 60-year-old Karstens says he could have expected before the state banned smoking in public places a year ago.
"It's terrible," Karstens said of the Smoke-Free Illinois Act, which he blames for the loss of about a fifth of his business. "It's the worst thing that could happen to a neighborhood saloon."
In the year since the new law kicked in, many bar owners say they've lost business, while casinos blame a drop in business on the ban and local governments that depend on gambling-tax revenue say they're sharing in the pain.
But the complaints aren't universal. Some bar owners say they've survived and even thrived since the ban, and organizations that pushed for it say the first year has been a success.
"I think it went exceptionally well," said Kathy Drea, the director of public policy for the American Lung Association. "We've heard from so many people that are now working in smoke-free work places and what a difference it's made in their lives. They just feel better."
Effective Jan. 1, 2008, the measure outlawed smoking in public places and within 15 feet of their exterior doors and windows. People and establishments that violate the law face fines of up to $250.
From the beginning, bars and casinos complained they would be hurt, while some prosecutors and police contended the law lacked details about how it should be enforced and how people cited for violations can appeal.
Those legal questions remain, Drea said.
The General Assembly's Joint Committee on Administrative Rules has never approved rules for enforcing the law, something the American Lung Association and others hope will be addressed through a Senate bill now awaiting action.
It also isn't clear how widely the ban is being enforced.
The Illinois Department of Health received about 5,500 complaints in 2008 about smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places, spokeswoman Kelly Jakubek said. But that number doesn't include complaints filed with county health departments and local law enforcement.
For the most part, Jakubek said, smokers and the businesses they frequent seem to be following the new law.
Two Joliet bar customers fined $231 each and sentenced in November to court supervision for lighting up in a bar are believed to be among the first found to have violated the law. Another Joliet resident pleaded guilty earlier this year to smoking in a bar and paid a $235 fine, while several other Will County cases are scheduled for court next year.
What is clear is that casino business is down since the ban started. Revenue at Illinois casinos dropped 20.2 percent between November 2007 and November 2008, according to the most recent figures available from the Illinois Gaming Board.
Several factors are to blame, among them the weak economy.
"But the majority of the decrease has been as a result of the smoking ban," said Tom Swoik, executive director of the Illinois Casino Gaming Association.
Swoik points out that casinos in Indiana, Missouri and Iowa - neighboring states where smoking is legal in casinos - saw nothing like Illinois' revenue drop, and he contends gamblers are leaving Illinois for casinos where they can smoke.
The American Lung Association's Drea disputes that. New casinos opened in those neighboring states over the past year, she said, which she believes accounts for their better fortunes.
And Illinois' sharp drop?
"Absolutely, I think it's the economy," she said. "The smoke-free law is insignificant."
Beyond the casinos, not all businesses affected by the new law say it's been a bad thing.
In Champaign, Toby Herges spent about $150,000 before the statewide ban kicked in on a heated, partially enclosed outdoor smoking area at his Tumble Inn bar, which opened in 1947.
"The whole idea was to just not lose the customers that we've had coming here for so many years," Herges said.
Instead, he said, he added customers who used to go to other bars, where they now have little choice in the winter but to stand outside in the wind and cold to light up.
It was 15 degrees and windy at Casey's in Moline on Wednesday afternoon. The deck Karstens built behind his bar doesn't do him or his smoking customers much good on a day like this, he said.
When the ban began, its backers predicted drinkers and gamblers who stayed away would be replaced by nonsmokers drawn to businesses where they could now breathe easier.
Karstens, whose great-grandfather opened Casey's during the Great Depression, says that never happened. Now, he figures he'll have to adapt by adding heat and some kind of enclosure to his deck to deal with a ban he said isn't like to go away.
"I don't think anything's going to change, not for a long time."
By David Mercer
Walt Karstens stood inside his 74-year-old wood-frame bar in Moline counting his customers, and the empty seats he says would have been filled a year ago.
About a dozen regulars had checked in at Casey's Tavern by late afternoon on New Year's Eve, roughly half the number the 60-year-old Karstens says he could have expected before the state banned smoking in public places a year ago.
"It's terrible," Karstens said of the Smoke-Free Illinois Act, which he blames for the loss of about a fifth of his business. "It's the worst thing that could happen to a neighborhood saloon."
In the year since the new law kicked in, many bar owners say they've lost business, while casinos blame a drop in business on the ban and local governments that depend on gambling-tax revenue say they're sharing in the pain.
But the complaints aren't universal. Some bar owners say they've survived and even thrived since the ban, and organizations that pushed for it say the first year has been a success.
"I think it went exceptionally well," said Kathy Drea, the director of public policy for the American Lung Association. "We've heard from so many people that are now working in smoke-free work places and what a difference it's made in their lives. They just feel better."
Effective Jan. 1, 2008, the measure outlawed smoking in public places and within 15 feet of their exterior doors and windows. People and establishments that violate the law face fines of up to $250.
From the beginning, bars and casinos complained they would be hurt, while some prosecutors and police contended the law lacked details about how it should be enforced and how people cited for violations can appeal.
Those legal questions remain, Drea said.
The General Assembly's Joint Committee on Administrative Rules has never approved rules for enforcing the law, something the American Lung Association and others hope will be addressed through a Senate bill now awaiting action.
It also isn't clear how widely the ban is being enforced.
The Illinois Department of Health received about 5,500 complaints in 2008 about smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places, spokeswoman Kelly Jakubek said. But that number doesn't include complaints filed with county health departments and local law enforcement.
For the most part, Jakubek said, smokers and the businesses they frequent seem to be following the new law.
Two Joliet bar customers fined $231 each and sentenced in November to court supervision for lighting up in a bar are believed to be among the first found to have violated the law. Another Joliet resident pleaded guilty earlier this year to smoking in a bar and paid a $235 fine, while several other Will County cases are scheduled for court next year.
What is clear is that casino business is down since the ban started. Revenue at Illinois casinos dropped 20.2 percent between November 2007 and November 2008, according to the most recent figures available from the Illinois Gaming Board.
Several factors are to blame, among them the weak economy.
"But the majority of the decrease has been as a result of the smoking ban," said Tom Swoik, executive director of the Illinois Casino Gaming Association.
Swoik points out that casinos in Indiana, Missouri and Iowa - neighboring states where smoking is legal in casinos - saw nothing like Illinois' revenue drop, and he contends gamblers are leaving Illinois for casinos where they can smoke.
The American Lung Association's Drea disputes that. New casinos opened in those neighboring states over the past year, she said, which she believes accounts for their better fortunes.
And Illinois' sharp drop?
"Absolutely, I think it's the economy," she said. "The smoke-free law is insignificant."
Beyond the casinos, not all businesses affected by the new law say it's been a bad thing.
In Champaign, Toby Herges spent about $150,000 before the statewide ban kicked in on a heated, partially enclosed outdoor smoking area at his Tumble Inn bar, which opened in 1947.
"The whole idea was to just not lose the customers that we've had coming here for so many years," Herges said.
Instead, he said, he added customers who used to go to other bars, where they now have little choice in the winter but to stand outside in the wind and cold to light up.
It was 15 degrees and windy at Casey's in Moline on Wednesday afternoon. The deck Karstens built behind his bar doesn't do him or his smoking customers much good on a day like this, he said.
When the ban began, its backers predicted drinkers and gamblers who stayed away would be replaced by nonsmokers drawn to businesses where they could now breathe easier.
Karstens, whose great-grandfather opened Casey's during the Great Depression, says that never happened. Now, he figures he'll have to adapt by adding heat and some kind of enclosure to his deck to deal with a ban he said isn't like to go away.
"I don't think anything's going to change, not for a long time."
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Sunday, November 09, 2008
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