City Council Plans Death of South Side

As is said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I firmly believe that Councilor Bruce Kraus has his heart in the right place. He wants to make life better for his South Side constituents. He constantly receives complaints about rowdy drunken revelers pissing on lawns, damaging private property, and generally wrecking havoc in the South Side neighborhood.

"[T]this morning in council, Pittsburgh City Councilman Bruce Kraus reintroduced a bill to limit bars on the South Side, after a similar bill was rejected last month by an Allegheny County Common Pleas Court judge.

Mr. Kraus said the new version of the bill would change city zoning rules to prohibit all new restaurants in the Carson Street corridor, whether or not they offered alcohol. According to the city Law Department, he said, if the bill is "alcohol-neutral, it will be held up by the courts.""

This latest legislation is intending to prohibit all new restaurants from opening on the South Side. Because of the previous limit on alcohol licenses, many previous restaurants had already discovered that it was more profitable to move and sell their alcohol licenses. The most recent and egregious example is Bruschetta which shuttered its doors to re-open as Villa, quite possibly the largest square footage of physical bar in all of the South Side.

If this legislation passes, not only will no new restaurants open, many restaurants will close to follow the suit of Bruschetta. The South Side needs a balance of restaurants, bars, shopping, grocery stores, etc. Without excessive punishing legislation, this will happen.

Instead, I recommend that Councilor Kraus follow the results of the hospitality study that he commissioned. Work with local businesses instead of attempting to squash new business, and we will have a vibrant community.

Congratulations to Baba D's

When Toby Keith and whoever has enough money can open a bar on the South Side, then you knew Bruce Kraus's stop-gap measure of a "saturation limit" on bars in the South Side wasn't going to fly in the courts. This was proved yesterday by the Allegheny Court of Common Pleas.

Judge James found that the ordinance was illegal because the city can't create special rules for bars. The city law was "an infringement on the power of the [state] Liquor Control Board and is invalid" becasue state law reserves most power to regulate alcohol for that agency.

I completely understand why the "saturation limit" was imposed. People that live on the South Side Flats were sick and tired of people pissing on their lawns and leaving broken bottles everywhere.

But the stop-gap measure was not the solution. All limiting the number of bars did was make it more expensive and difficult to get a liquor license. It did not increase the number of toilets on the South Side. It did not increase the number of trash cans. Ultimately, it was bad for small businesses. Baba D's was the scapegoat of this law. This restaurant was denied a liquor license and fought the law. They won.

Now, maybe we can get serious, read the South Side Hospitality Proposal, and actually address the South Side's issues?

Or not.

City Councilman Bruce Kraus, who represents the South Side, has already proposed a slightly modified version of the ordinance in a preemptive effort to keep it in force in the case of a court decision like the one rendered yesterday.

Oh well.

More Funding for Pittsburgh "Highways"

I'm a resident of the South Side of Pittsburgh and normally when the federal dollars start flowing in my neighborhood, I find it difficult to complain. Except for this time. Why is PennDOT widening Carson Street between 25th St and 33rd St? I just don't understand.

Carson Street is a mess. It's not especially pedestrian friendly - and in the vicinity of the Birmingham Bridge, it's especially pedestrian-unfriendly. I frequently fear for my safety while crossing the street in that area. Yet PennDOT and our generous state senators have won the fight to make Carson Street wider???

I understand that this is a heavy truck route. But I certainly don't feel the need to encourage that the home to "America's longest business Victorian National Historic District" be a more pleasant and convenient truck route.

And is it really in our best interest to enable bar patrons to drive their cars more quickly and efficiently after closing hours at the many bars on Carson St? How about we encourage them to take the bus instead?

Carson Street is not a highway. It's a business district. But if PennDOT and short-sighted leadership have their way, I wonder how long that's going to last. If I had my way, I'd shut Carson Street down between 10th and 22nd Streets to cars every Friday and Saturday night except for public transportation. If Austin, Texas and New York City can do it, why can't Pittsburgh? Heck, in my ideal world, Carson would be shut down every day of the week with walking and light rail being your only option for traveling the street. While we're at it, how about shutting down Penn Ave in The Strip every Saturday?

Beer - More and Less

While we're all waiting for the inevitable yet snails-paced opening of the Hofbrauhaus, delayed by the onset of the drink tax and the slow pace of public services, we can at least continue to frequent Penn Brewery. The North Side Leadership Conference showed reality to Penn Brewery's greedy landlords who were mistakenly under the impression that an official recession was the time to triple the rent and attract new big-budget renters. Now we can look forward to another 5 years of Penn Brewery at its current location. The beer is dead. Long live the beer.

Back to Priorities

Like Obama listed his 3 priorities for the nation, I list my 3 major talking points on this blog: drinking, public transportation, and general political idiocy with a bit of my questionable morals thrown in to spice things up.

Back to the number one priority - drinking.

Pittsburgh is a drinking city. This guy chronicled bars in all 90 of our neighborhoods. We have a brewery in a church. Hofbrauhaus picked Pittsburgh as their 3rd location in the country. And from football games to art galleries, beer drinking goes with the territory. With proper precautions (i.e. drunk driving education and enforcement), I'm all for it.

For such a city, though, why do we put up with the yoke of the PLCB and the case law?

Oftentimes as a city we look to the East for inspiration. Is that it? We want to resemble the liberal state of Massachusetts (who historically didn't allow beer and liquor sales on Sunday) or Connecticut (who physically places tarps over the beer in grocery stores after 9pm and on Sundays ) or perhaps live-free-or-die New Hampshire (who runs a similar state-run liquor store plan yet somehow manages to have the cheapest prices in the region). If so, we need to start looking West to California, where if you want a bottle of vodka, you pick it up with your orange juice.

Do we really believe deep down inside that drinking is evil? And that we need the PLCB to protect us? After all the wording of the law which created the PLCB says the following:

This act shall be deemed an exercise of the police power of the Commonwealth for the protection of the public welfare, health, peace and morals of the people of the Commonwealth and to prohibit forever the open saloon, and all of the provisions of this act shall be liberally construed for the accomplishment of this purpose.

Or perhaps it's because our state continues to make money hand over fist because of the aforementioned slick setup? In this year of economic downturn, the only bright spot in the economy appears to be liquor sales. PLCB reported record sales last year. They're making so much money they've even hired an image consultant to make us like them more. Fat chance. Personally, I feel if the PLCB is going to pillage my wallet, they should at least turn their excess profits over to the state instead of working on their branding.

Is it really a surprise that when the state gave Pittsburgh options for funding Port Authority their only viable option was a drink tax? No. What's surprising is that we continue to put with it.

Break the Yoke

What do my favorite Mexican tienda and my favorite 50s style diner have in common? They're in blighted neighborhoods along light-rail tracks. Between tax dollars for transit-area development, the drink tax, and a general scare of gasoline prices, public transportation and these potentially vibrant areas are getting even more attention.

Not surprisingly, people are discovering it's fun to break the yoke of the car. Even if they have to commute to work during the week, they're excited to walk to their quaint neighborhood market on the weekend and not deal with the evil demon of Penn DOT road-closings. Or maybe after sitting in rush hour traffic to get home, they just want to walk over to the neighborhood bar for happy hour. Personally, I learned this lesson after a month of driving in NYC-area traffic.

Up until now, the transit-center focus in Pittsburgh has been on East Liberty. Target, Whole Foods, and the East Busway are proving to be a sound marriage. Now is the time to learn from our lessons and expand. The money is flowing and our neighborhoods need help. Our love affair with strip malls and McMansions can come to an end or at least learn to co-habitate with pedestrian-friendly fun urban environments where going for a walk doesn't have to be on a treadmill and where going out for a night-on-the-town doesn't involve any parking headaches or traffic and where buying a house still can cost less than $50,000.

On second thought, don't redevelop these neighborhoods. I don't want my favorite businesses driven out from high rent prices or over-run with band-wagoners. (Yes, that was a joke.)

It's about Time!

Those guys over in Harrisburg finally took their heads out of their asses and the state smoking ban is now out of committee. When I moved to Pittsburgh over a year ago, I was excited to see that a smoking ban had been passed for Allegheny county. Unfortunately, that ban was over-turned very rapidly. Now, after a year of the state discussing it, 6 people in a committee are finally ready to present a bill to the Senate and House of Representatives. Having seen the change-over to state-wide smoking bans while living in both Connecticut and New York and seeing that the sky didn't fall and all legitimate businesses continued to stay in business and do well, I'm a big proponent of these bills.

Frankly, it's been embarrassing to bring out-of-towners to Pittsburgh for one reason alone, the smoke when we go out to restaurants.

Unfortunately, it is a shoddy bill, but it is better than nothing. I would love to hear someone justify this exception as anything except pandering to constituents: "smaller 'mom and pop"'taverns where food sales don't exceed 20 percent of total revenue." Does Jack's count? Does the Town Tavern? Of course, there's the obvious casino exemption as well, so maybe the committee-members were just hedging their bets?

(reference: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08155/887031-100.stm)

Why do I drink at the bars?

Bar-goers in Pittsburgh have caught a lot of flack lately.
The general sentiment I've heard condones the drink tax, stating that it mostly affects binging college students, as though respectable, money-earning people don't go to the bar, as though it's somehow more shameful to go out to the bar after the age 22 instead of staying inside and drinking a case of beer.

To be frank, this pisses me off. I moved to Pittsburgh in August (young person #28 this year), and I like to go out to the bar. There's nothing more fun in Pittsburgh than the crowd at a Pittsburgh bar on a Steelers game day. And a weekday happy hour on the South Side is usually calm and casual - except at Nakama. If I can get beer at the bar for almost as cheap as I can buy it by the case, I will gladly do so for the social interaction value alone. In fact, I have bought one case of beer since August, but I've gone out to the bar at least once a week. Does that make me a bad person? Why am I suddenly the person who needs to pay the burden of public transportation in this whole county?

I won't stop going to the bars, and I surely hope that other people in this city don't let it deter them either, but this tax will definitely affect me and my purchasing power.