Battle brews over neighborhood bars

Bob McCarthy sees his bar as a splash of Manhattan in Salt Lake City, a place where Capitol Hill and Avenues sophisticates could soon sip wine and martinis after work.

Some of his neighbors see the bar as a danger to the children who live nearby.

It's a relationship shaken, stirred and on the rocks, as Salt Lake leaders near a decision on whether to allow neighborhood bars to serve up more than just beer.

"It makes me nervous," Art Brown, Salt Lake's president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, told the City Council last month. "It makes me nervous for the kids."

Brown was one of 22 people — 11 on either side of the issue — to weigh in on a zoning change that would allow private clubs on a case-by-case basis in residential mixed-use areas, a zone stretching from South Temple to 380 South and from 250 East to 550 East.

The owner of Andy's Place, a beer bar near 500 East and 200 South, requested the change. Lou Corsillo, the owner, said it would make his 1,100-square-foot tavern more profitable. "Beer bars just don't cut it anymore," he said.

But most of the public outcry to date has been over McCarthy's Club Jam, 751 N. 300 West.

"They know that if Andy's gets the text change, more than likely we will," said McCarthy, who believes his club needs more than beer to survive. "The tavern thing was around when the neighborhood was kind of blue-collar — warehouse workers and oil-refinery workers. The neighborhood is changing. It's going trendy."

But even before McCarthy and Jam co-owner Brian Morris applied for a the change that would allow private clubs in mixed-use zones, such as the Marmalade, Laura Fuller pleaded for the City Council to protect her nine children.

Sam Peterson said he worried for the "40 children within 50 yards of Club Jam."

"I don't think we should have a bar up there because there are a lot of kids up there," Peterson's young son, Marcus, told the council. "I have a lot of friends on the street, and I don't want any of them getting hurt."

They were pleas that did not go unnoticed by council members, who spent the following weeks speaking with law enforcement officials and the state's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Though Brown and others have said allowing a bar to sell hard alcohol would increase drunken driving, local law enforcement officials said there aren't numbers to back up those claims. Officers ask drunk drivers where they had their last drink, but they don't always get reliable answers — if the question is answered at all, police said.

Salt Lake Police Chief Chris Burbank said his officers made 2,000 public intoxication arrests last year.

"The retail outlet responsible for most of those is the state liquor store," Burbank said.