Transcripts

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Nightclubs constantly open and close, or change owners, and for lots of different reasons. There have been so many comings and goings that Ray Seville has to write them down to help him remember.

RAY SEVILLE: 25, 30 of them. They all closed, come and gone.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Seville is the underwriting manager for KMOJ Radio. And for the last few decades, Seville has also DJd and hosted parties at clubs around the Twin Cities. Seville runs down a list of former nightspots that attracted African-Americans, like Norma Jean's, Sylvia's, Cato Club, Escape Ultra Lounge. And then he pauses when he gets to the Riverview Supper Club.

RAY SEVILLE: I love the Riverview. And a lot of people do miss it, even though in its latter years, later years, that it got to be rough and tough.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: One night near closing time in 2000, a man who was tossed out of the Riverview returned with a gun and wounded two security guards and a patron. The shooting was reportedly the final straw for the Fuller family who had owned the nightspot for 50 years. The Riverview closed its doors in 2001 and was eventually torn down and replaced by condominiums.

Seville says violence is not exclusive to clubs frequented by African-Americans. But he says there is a young male knucklehead contingency that can quickly give a club a bad name. Seville says there's plenty of responsibility to go around, starting with the knuckleheads themselves. But he says ultimately, if a club owner wants to stay in business, they've got to do a better job of weeding out the riffraff.

RAY SEVILLE: There's a few bad apples out there. And those are the ones you have to keep out of the club, or you check them. You check them, say, hey look, you want to continue coming here, you need to stop what you're doing.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Sometimes the way people behave outside a nightclub is the issue. According to the Minneapolis Police Department, over the last two years, Gabby's Saloon generated nearly 200 calls for service. Many of the calls were for fights, loud music, and other disturbances.

And most of the calls were logged at or near the 2:00 AM bar closing time. Chris Gams is with the Bottineau Neighborhood Association. Gams says the noise was the worst.

CHRIS GAMS: People being just loud after a night out, walking right by-- right within 20 feet of a house and just being loud, or even getting into arguments. Turning on-- getting into cars and cranking the stereos.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: In 2008, the city tried to force the bar to correct some of these issues by putting conditions on Gabby's liquor license. But Gabby sued the city and won. The court ruled that the city couldn't prove that the problems were caused by Gabby's patrons.

Gabby's owner also said the city's actions were motivated by discrimination. That's because most of the noise complaints occurred on nights when the club featured hip-hop music. The surrounding neighborhood is mostly white. But Chris Gams says neighbors complaints were not race-based.

CHRIS GAMS: It's 2:30 in the morning. If you're woken up, you're woken up. It really doesn't make that much difference.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: MPR tried to contact Jeff Orman, the owner of Gabby's Saloon, to ask if he was selling the bar because of the neighborhood complaints and the legal issues with the city. But Orman didn't return our calls. The woman who's buying Gabby's, Leslie Bock, owner of nearby Psycho Suzy's Tiki Lounge, says she plans to change the entertainment format so the predominantly black crowds that flock to Gabby's for hip-hop and ladies nights will likely migrate somewhere else. It probably won't be hard for patrons to find someplace else to go.

Ray Seville at KMOJ says the so-called black nights, the nights which attract African-American club goers, are lucrative for the clubs. But he says that doesn't mean the cycle of openings, closings, and ownership changes will end anytime soon. Brandt Williams. Minnesota Public Radio News, Minneapolis.