Residents and politicians want Club 11’s license revoked
After a string of violent incidents occurred outside Club Eleven, a strip club on Randall Avenue, many outraged members of the community are calling for the club’s liquor license to be revoked.
Saying the club’s supervision of its operations are inadequate, the State Liquor Authority is in the process of filing a laundry list of charges against Club 11.
The complaints include at least six altercations or assaults near the club between January 2011 and April 2012. The incidents have made the club a “focal point for police attention,” the SLA says. In 2010 the agency fined Club Eleven $3,500 for becoming a police focal point.
It also fined the club $1,000 for failing to display its liquor license and other legally required signs.
The most violent incident to occur recently outside Club Eleven was a fight in July in which two people were shot and five more suffered knife wounds. Police are still investigating the incident, but police from the neighboring precinct in Mott Haven foiled a revenge plot in connection with the brawl, said Captain Philip Rivera, the commander of Hunts Point’s 41st precinct.
“Historical violence dates back to 2009,” said Rivera. “We provided the SLA with all the incidents and enforcement efforts that have happened.” According to the captain, “the major problem has been as patrons exit, they get into fights intoxicated.”
Local state politicians have joined the effort to shut the club down by stripping it of its liquor license.
“The continued operations of this establishment, and the allowance of a liquor license to raise revenue to continue its operation, serves as a detriment to” Hunts Point residents’ efforts to “correct the false image as an area of lawlessness and deviant activity,” read a letter addressed to the chairman of the SLA and signed by Senator Jeffrey Klein, Assemblyman Marcos Crespo and Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo. The letter also discussed the “shootings, several large brawls and a sexual assault” outside the club.
“Getting the liquor license revoked is no easy process,” said Eric Souffer, the director of communications for the Independent Democratic Conference, which Klein heads. “You really need to build a lengthy history of cases against an establishment before the SLA will consider revoking the liquor license.”
Despite the challenge, Souffer said, “We’re hopeful that the SLA will consider our widespread concerns about Club Eleven’s miserable record of public safety in the area.”
Some Hunts Point residents also argued that shutting down Club Eleven and other strip clubs would curtail the violence on the neighborhood streets.
“Where there’s liquor, there is always going to be crime,” said Davis Roldan, 32, outside the Hunts Point Avenue subway station, “especially in places like this where there’s hardly any cops.”
Roldan proceeded to describe the classic strip club scene where a drunk patron misbehaves with one of the dancers and gets ejected.
“Dudes are going to come back and try to hit up the bouncer,” he said. When “the dude can’t handle his liquor like the next man could, there’s going to be a problem.”
While Roldan said he thought shutting down Club Eleven would be a good for Hunts Point, he also thought that the decision was bound to upset some of the neighborhood’s other residents. Indeed, not everyone in the community said they felt that cracking down on the strip clubs was a good idea.
“There’s a lot of violence that goes on up here, but there’s no strip club,” said John McClain, 32, sitting outside the Hunts Point Recreation Center. McClain said he thought the local strip clubs attracted no more violence than the regular bars around town. “A bar and strip club are basically the same thing,” he said. “I don’t think there is much difference.”
“Any time a person has a good way to provide for their family without selling drugs,” McClain added, “I don’t think they should revoke that.”
However, Community Board 2 District Manager Rafael Salamanca said that strip clubs do in fact attract more crime than regular bars.
“In our area we have a prostitution issue,” Salamanca said. “This happens at 4, 5, 6 in the morning and we have our mothers and wives going to work in the morning and they have been harassed” by strip club patrons mistaking them for prostitutes.
Efforts to reach Club Eleven for comment were unsuccessful.
Community Board 2 has made getting rid of strip clubs one of its priorities. In April, the SLA rejected the liquor license application of King of Clubs, a topless bar seeking to open on Oak Point Avenue, but it also approved a license for another strip club, Platinum Pleasures, on Lafayette Avenue. Platinum Pleasures is now involved in a new dispute over the use of the parking lot of the nearby McDonald’s by strippers and customers.
Until the Liquor Authority reaches a decision on Club 11, the 41st precinct will be watching. His officers are routinely stopping at the local clubs and shutting them down if they are found to have any violations, Rivera said.