The Third Street Cafe, with the Taproom (the empty sign) next door, at the corner of N. 3rd and Calder streets in Harrisburg.
There’s been a major development in Harrisburg’s continuing battle of the bars, though not one most people were focused on.
Today, at N. 3rd and Calder streets, the Taproom’s door was locked shut, and no one answered the door or picked up the phone. In fact, the bar closed after its final patron walked out on New Year’s Eve and has not opened since.
Mayor Eric Papenfuse said last week that the city would not issue the bar a 2016 business license, and it appears that owner Dave Larche has chosen not to fight the denial.
That would be a second victory for Papenfuse, who, last year, tried to revoke business licenses for three bars that the city considered to be troubled. One of the bars, the Royal Pub in Uptown Harrisburg, closed immediately. Larche legged it out until the end of the year, leaving just his next-door neighbor, the Third Street Café, as the final holdout.
Indeed, the Third Street Café was open today, music blaring through its closed door as several men milled outside in the middle of the afternoon in the frigid air.
The bar continues to operate even though, like the Taproom next door, it no longer holds a valid business license. Come Thursday (10 days after receiving a notice of non-renewal), the city could fine the bar up to $600 a day, said Papenfuse.
Meanwhile, the bar’s attorney has filed a motion with the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas arguing that the Third Street Café should remain open until the city’s Tax and Appeal Board can hear the case.
For those following the story, this may sound familiar.
Last March, the city informed all three bars that it planned to revoke their 2015 business licenses due to repeated incidents of alleged criminal activity in and around them. The Third Street Café appealed that action to the Tax and Appeal Board. After losing that appeal, it appealed to the county court.
Now, the stage is set for the same series of events to repeat, only this time for the 2016 license. Assuming the bar loses its appeal to the board, it may well appeal again to the court.
It didn’t have to happen this way.
Judge Andrew Dowling let this matter dangle into 2016 by refusing to rule on the bar’s 2015 business license last year. In September, he let the bar stay open until he could make a decision, but that decision never came. By not acting, he allowed the clock to run out on the issue, avoiding, for now, a tough judgment that would have resulted in either bad optics (letting an allegedly troubled bar stay open) or bad politics (letting the city close a private business). As a result, the city and the bar enter 2016 without direction from the court.
Meanwhile, one of the few substantive statements from the court becomes more comical by the day. In allowing the bar to stay open until he could rule (which, again, he did not), Dowling wrote:
“Appellant has made a strong showing that without the requested relief, he will suffer irreparable injury, that the issuance of a stay will not substantially harm other interested parties in the proceedings and that the issue of a stay will not adversely affect the public interest in any tangible way.”
In fact, the public interest is being adversely affected—profoundly so. Just before Christmas, several patrons spilled out into the street, and gunfire erupted just outside the bar. No one was hit—this time—but bullets pinging around the busy corner of N. 3rd and Calder streets easily could have struck a pedestrian, a driver, a bus passenger, a child, anyone.
Is that enough adversity for Dowling?
We can add that incident to at least eight others around the bar, ranging from drug dealing to assaults, which the city cited in testimony before the judge. Then there’s the daily street harassment, the loitering, vagrancy and public drunkenness that surrounds the bar, but that’s something that the people who live, work and do business in the area are just supposed to put up with, right?
In his argument, the bar’s attorney basically said—yes. He said the bar bears little, if any, responsibility for the actions of its patrons and placed blame for the problems around the bar on, well, everyone else: the city, Capital Area Transit, the Taproom next door, even area residents for having the nerve to want to live free of crime and fear.
“I wouldn’t want to live near a bar, would you?” he said.
Moreover, he has mounted a “bar as victim” argument, saying the bar doesn’t attract crime, but merely has the misfortune of being located in a high-crime area.
So, best case, Dowling continues to duck the case and allows the city to fine the bar and—those fines not paid—lets city officials eventually padlock the door. In the meantime, we’ll just have to hope that no one gets struck by a bullet near a bar that does “not adversely affect the public interest in any tangible way.”
And worst case: somehow the bar manages to cobble together a survival strategy and lasts another year. Then you and I and others who have the unmitigated gall to want to live in a decent place or just walk safely down the street will have to make do with the court-protected, officially sanctioned community asset that is the Third Street Café.
