Truth be told, part 3 of the Raising the bar series is a combination of two different suggested stories: What are Halifax's forgotten music venues? and What does it take to keep a bar going in Halifax? Adrian Lee's last page on the history and future of Halifax's bars starts here.
In his two decades of DJing at Halifax clubs, Joseph Serra—perhaps better known as DJ Jorun Bombay—has seen a lot.
He’s seen a then-unsigned band named Sloan play intimate sets at the Double Deuce Roadhouse. He’s played alongside Juno award-winning Buck 65 at Café Ole, and recalls having Joel Plaskett’s Thrush Hermit open for his hip-hop group in a sparsely attended show there, too. He hosted a weekly funk night at Tribeca, and he's played alongside local emcee Ghettosocks at the Marquee and the Paragon.
He’s also seen those bars close down. And, in December, when Tribeca closed down, Serra tried awful hard to not be cynical about it.
“But I’m used to it now,” he said. “People hold on to things—when Café Ole closed, I was trying to hold on to it—but it’s pointless. It just seems like this time, they’re plucking more than we can deal with…it’s like, ‘okay, where do we go now?’”
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Tribeca is just the latest closure in a long tradition of bar turnover over the last decade; in the last year, the Elephant & Castle, the Paragon, and Coconut Grove also closed down. As much as drinking has become ingrained in Halifax culture—with its enduring myth of having one of the continent’s greatest number of bars per capita—the city seems resigned to its bars coming and going. “The nightlife is actually very important to not just the existence of the downtown, but also the overall economy,” said Downtown Halifax Business Commission’s Paul MacKinnon. Many of those shuttered bars, including all four that closed this year, are taking the music stages that give the arts community a home. “Venues closing is detrimental to the live music industry, which…contributes significant money to our economy and employs thousands of people,” said Jonny Stevens, executive director of the Halifax Pop Explosion.
It’s a tradition that endures, because the problem is manifold and complicated. But with bars calling for increased communication, bar owners are saying that it’s gotten tougher over the last decade. “It seems as though there’s an environment in place in Halifax that makes it difficult for a venue to do business,” said Stevens. “It’s becoming harder and harder for these places to operate at a profit.”
The many issues largely revolve around capacity. How many people can fit into a given space is the major driver for bars; it affects how much alcohol they can sell, how much cover they’ll receive, what kind of performers they can host. This is especially pertinent as rents rise across downtown Halifax; MacKinnon says the phasing out of the business occupancy tax has actually driven rents up. Bars work with two numbers—a liquor capacity and a fire capacity. According to representatives from both departments, liquor occupancy loads are measured according only to square footage, at a rate of 12 square feet per person, and are used primarily as part of a bar’s application process, as public hearing objections may or may not occur if the number is 60 or 400. Fire occupancy loads factor in exits and don’t include dance floors as part of square footage. But because bars work with the lowest of the numbers, a discrepancy can be confounding. Stevens remembers that because there the liquor capacity was over 100 people lower, he had to turn away people at the door for a Pop Explosion show despite a venue that still had room to spare.
This summer, Jorun got a call the day before his weekly funk night at Tribeca that the fire safety inspector—bars are regularly inspected by agents from distinct liquor, fire, and food safety departments—had ruled that a door did not constitute an exit, lowering the bar’s capacity from 192 to 60. Annie Valentina, the bar’s bookings manager, said that a previous fire marshal had ruled that the door did count, but he had left the post in August.
Tribeca made some renovations to bring it up to code, but had their capacity restored only to 120. It would have cost over $20,000 to make renovations to bring them back up to 192. That capacity was too low for Tribeca to survive, and they couldn’t afford the renovation—and that was basically that. “Whoever decides to implement the bylaws—that’s the word,” she said. “You can’t negotiate, you can’t get around it, and often, it’s very detached from the bar industry.”
“If you can’t sit down and negotiate and feel like someone has a genuine interest in helping make things work—because of course we want to do things right, but sometimes we need some help—but there seems to be a lack of willingness to meet us halfway.”
Ash MacLeod, the former manager of the Marquee and the Sea Horse, suggests that subjectivity reached back to his time in the early ‘00s. “There are some pubs and taverns in Halifax that seem to be exempt from the laws of logic on a hot summer night to the point that I don’t see how it can be safe and is certainly more crowded than some of these other places,” he said.
MacLeod said he never had a problem with inspectors in his time, but said that may have changed; Greg Clark, who managed or owned nine different bars in a storied career, said that inspections were much more lax in that heyday. “They weren’t enforcing things really back then like they are now,” he said. “You never really saw the fire inspectors very often.”
Valentina said there were other, more minor reasons behind the bar’s closure, but it was the enforcement process—how arbitrary, subjective and relentless it was—that left her most frustrated. Aside from the fire marshal’s ruling, Tribeca faced more frequent fire and liquor inspections—usually monthly, in addition to visits on busy weekends.
“There definitely seemed to be an increased amount of heat on Tribeca…in the last year,” said Valentina. She said she had spoken, long ago, to a longtime bar insider who said they had seen this many times, where any given bar would come under fire from every department. She didn’t believe it until she saw it first-hand. “You feel a little picked on. You try to be agreeable, but sometimes it’s hard; you know you have no say.”
This tale of two numbers also confuses Shelley MacPhail, the general manager of the Sea Horse and a former manager of the Marquee. “It’s so different between the fire department and the liquor board,” she said. For her, it’s just another sign of outdated bylaws. Most Halifax bars have either a lounge license or a cabaret license. A lounge license requires a kitchen to have food available for a minimum of five hours in order to allow the business to serve alcohol until 2 a.m.; a cabaret license demands a focus on live entertainment and allows bars to serve until 4 in the morning. For lounges, the kitchen makes no sense. “I am paying someone to be there from 4 o’clock til 9 o’clock when I know I will not have one customer or sell one plate of food,” she said. “I actually have to come to work every day and be a bad manager on purpose to satisfy an arbitrary rule.”
Valentina says the same was true in Tribeca. “We were serving pub food because we had to,” she said, “but between midnight and two, that’s when we made our money.”
MacPhail hasn’t shared Valentina’s difficulties with inspectors, but her beef is with the rules they enforce: “The people at the AGD are lovely people—they’re often as baffled as we are, as frustrated as I am. They’re not the enemy—the enemy is the outdated, arbitrary-seeming regulations that we follow because, well, we have to.”
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| The Marquee died in 2009. |
MacPhail, who also managed the Marquee about a decade ago, believes the laws need an overhaul, or standby bars will start being affected. “I worry about the Sea Horse every single day,” she said. She says she’s seen capacities go down over her 12 years in the industry as rents increase. “It’s a complaint I’m hearing all the time,” she said. She also says she doesn’t understand why there is a separate liquor and fire capacity.
Fire Services says they’ve been working more closely with the AGD in the last two years. Spokesman Craig Macdonald says that for new bars, the AGD will use their occupancy load to extend their own. He also added that since 2003, when the province’s Fire Safety Act was proclaimed, fire inspectors have become “more proactive;”—where previously there were no legislatively mandatory inspections, they must now be carried out once every 36 months. He also disagrees with the assertion that inspections are subjective, pointing to the fact that inspectors can only demand that building owners hire a consultant to set a capacity, which Fire Services then agrees or disagrees with. MacDonald recommends consultants are brought in after any renovations or actions that may affect the occupant load: “As soon as you make any changes, it can impact an occupant load; simply moving a table can impact the occupant load, adding or removing furnishings can impact the occupant load.”
But that’s not always practical. Even the Sea Horse, an established local institution, can only barely afford to be proactive and “pay the big bucks” for regular consultant work. “That’s like putting on armor before battle,” said MacPhail.
As for the discrepancy, John MacDonald, the executive director of the AGD, says that results from old fire assessments from as many as 100 years ago which don’t take into account any changes through time; liquor load assessments, meanwhile, occur much more frequently. However, MacDonald does not know why a kitchen is a requisite for a lounge license. “The regulations are what the regulations are, and as long as there’s that requirement for kitchen service, then that’s what we’ll enforce,” he said.
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| Bubaiskull played during the "next Seattle" era in Halifax |
As for cabaret licenses, there is also an increasing sense that the UARB is unwilling to distribute any more. They have not renewed or awarded one since the Toothy Moose took over the Embassy’s license in 2009, and Reflections was told that it could move to the old Paragon space on Gottingen Street only if it opened a kitchen and applied for a lounge license. “All bar managers and all bar owners are under the belief that there will be no more cabaret licenses to anyone anywhere,” said MacPhail.
“Staggered bar hours now is actually a good thing,” said MacKinnon. He says if everyone left at 2 o’clock, there would be more violence at choke points like Pizza Corner. He recalls that in 2006, after the high-profile murder of a navy officer, “the conclusion seemed to be that [a cabaret’s 4 a.m. closing time] was a good thing, and now it seems police are changing their minds on that.”
Valentina is convinced communication would help the confusion around both licenses. “If the by-laws have always been there, and they’re being enforced more strictly and more rigidly than in the past, then you have outdated laws that are being enforced in a more rigid way, so it feels regressive,” she said.
But Fire Services doesn’t see the necessity of an open forum, because of the inviolability of the law: “There is no leeway there in terms of determining occupancy loads because the regulations are specific,” said Craig MacDonald. He says there can be some discretion from the inspector if there is a first-time, minor and fixable problem, but that there is “zero tolerance” on issues of exits and repeat “piddly” offences. The AGD’s John MacDonald says a forum is unnecessary because of regular consultations with trade unions that help amend the Liquor Control Act; neither MacPhail nor Valentina were aware of these.
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| "Next Seattle" bands play in New York. Note the lineup is almost the same as this. |
And all this could be different in a friendlier atmosphere among clubs. “There used to be a code among DJs in the city that you didn’t step on each other’s toes,” Serra said. He remembers a bar scene in the ‘90s that allowed the music scene to blossom, where bars would help each other, book the same performers at different slots on the same nights, schedule events around other bars’ events, and let each other know if the liquor inspector was making rounds.
“That was really the start of it for the clubs,” he said. “There was a brotherhood, a family, even though they were separate businesses. When one was in jeopardy, others would help them. Everybody was looking out for each other. Nobody’s looking out for each other now, it’s all self, self, self. The DJs are like that, the clubs are like that, and clubs have no choice but to be that way.”
“It’s more a survivalist mentality now,” said MacPhail. “People can’t play together anymore.”
And in a survivalist mode, businesses tend to do what’s safe. MacPhail said that if Halifax doesn’t like your idea, you’re done, so bars do what Halifax already likes. This is best expressed by live music venues, who according to Ash MacLeod have seen DJ acts become popular and have brought them in, contrary to the kind of alternative experimenting that drove Halifax’s ‘90s “next Seattle” music scene. “There’s a lot less room for trial. There’s not that community that just goes out to see a band whether you’re a fan or not,” said MacLeod. “You can lead a horse to water, but they have to want to go. But that’s a tough sell. It’s amazing how hard it is to convince people to do what they like.”
There are many other lesser factors, as well. Kyle McCracken—or DJ KDZ—suggests liquor sales have been harmed by a recent rise in MDMA use among the university crowd. Valentina also said that since Tribeca closed, a number of people have contacted her who, armed only with money and enthusiasm, think they have what it takes to operate a bar. MacKinnon believes that 2008 legislation decreeing a $2.50 minimum price for pint or a shot “changed the landscape a little bit”, removing the “draft wars” element that defined the popularity of certain bars; he also hoped that bars and the business association could work closer together in the future. It’s also impossible to deny that others sink simply because of a failed business plan.
But for all the factors, MacLeod, MacPhail, Clark, Serra and Valentina all agree on one thing: to survive, bars need is to be able to adapt to anything that comes its way.
“You need to be able to roll with the punches,” said Valentina.
