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May 21, 2012
Are concerns about Barclays Center liquor license "entitled neighborhood grievance"? Times columnist doesn't look closely enough
Atlantic Yards Report
Ginia Bellafante's Big City column yesterday in the New York Times Metropolitan section, The Neighborhood Drinking Problem, raised the question: "Should we think harder about drinking as a matter of urban policy?"
And in getting to her prime example--the threat in Corona, Queens, where working-class single male immigrants face a plethora of bars--the writer took an uninformed swipe at the arguments over the Barclays Center liquor license.
Bellafante wrote:
The problem with modern-day temperance initiatives in New York — beyond the obvious risk of their seeming hoary in a place where a wine bar provides the ultimate imprimatur of gentrification — is that they so often take the form of entitled neighborhood grievance. Recently in Chelsea, residents protested the potential opening of a gastro pub that had the well-known club owner Amy Sacco attached...
In the same vein, this month, Brooklyn Speaks, an amalgamation of civic organizations and community groups concerned about the development at Atlantic Yards, drew up a petition calling on the State Liquor Authority to end alcohol sales at the Barclays Center arena no later than 10 p.m. The group worried that drinking at the stadium could linger on until 4 a.m., even though no amount of N.B.A. overtime — or encores at a Bon Jovi concert, for that matter — would ever likely last that long. (The group was seeking to end drinks sales at basketball games at half time; at Madison Square Garden, they are permitted until the beginning of the fourth quarter.)
These outcries, however warranted, have received far more attention than the existing threat to civic and social life elsewhere.
Looking more closely
It's not unreasonable to point to Corona, but to consider qualms about the Barclays Center liquor license "entitled neighborhood grievance" (yet "however warranted") is to not have looked closely enough.
Indeed, as one commenter on the article observed, the arena operator "has REQUESTED that drinks be served at its establishment until 4 am. It's not an idle idea floating out there as your article implies."
And, as BrooklynSpeaks points out, liquor sales after 9:30 pm are banned at Wrigley Field in Chicago. That's because Wrigley is ensconced in a residential neighborhood.
Related content...
The New York Times, The Neighborhood Drinking Problem
In 2009, alcohol was responsible for more than 8,840 hospitalizations in New York, a 36 percent increase over 2000. Additionally, the proportion of alcohol-related emergency-room visits among New Yorkers ages 21 to 64 doubled from 2003 to 2009. There were 70,000 such visits just in 2009.
...The Bloomberg administration, for its part, is adamant that it is not seeking to reduce the number of bars in the city, a spokesman said. (“The answer is no.”) Responding to inquiries earlier this year about whether the city might discourage the opening of more bars, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, said, “We’re deeply committed to encouraging entrepreneurs to start and expand small businesses in the city.”
In this instance an interventionist administration that recently called for residential buildings to regulate smoking seems oddly satisfied simply to play advertiser in chief.
Eschaton, It's The Pre-Game Drinking That's The Problem
I think efforts to limit the time of booze sales at sports events is really counterproductive. People aren't getting plastered off of $8 Coors Lights, they're getting plastered from the shots they downed before they walked into the place. Limit sales at the games and you're going to encourage more of that.
NoLandGrab: No, we're pretty sure from our many visits to sporting events that arena patrons are indeed getting plastered off of $8 (or $9) Coors Lights.
Posted by eric at May 21, 2012 11:16 AM