South Side nightlife plan invites a manager to the party

When Pittsburgh Councilman Bruce Kraus set out to better understand the South Side -- its assets, its problems and possible solutions -- he turned to 19-year-old intern Bryan Woll.

The 55-year-old councilman, who moved to the Flats in 1983 and typically is in pajamas by 10 p.m., wanted to see the neighborhood "from the eyes of someone who is presently experiencing being young, wanting to socialize, wanting to be out, and being out at 2 o'clock in the morning when I am not likely to be out," he said last week.

The result of their collaboration is an 85-page report analyzing the best and worst of the neighborhood, and laying out scores of potential measures for improving relations between daytime and nighttime businesses and residents and visitors to the historic entertainment district. Called "Inviting, Safe and Cohesive: A proposal for the management of the South Side using responsible hospitality practices," it could prompt citywide changes.

Some of the options are legislative, like revising the city's noise ordinance and crafting an "entertainment code." Others are administrative, like tracking where arrested drunken people got their last drink and analyzing the data to find problem bars.

Most are collaborative, like working with businesses and nearby universities to write a "code of conduct" for people using the neighborhood.

In Mr. Kraus' view, many measures could be applicable throughout the city, but he's starting in the South Side. To that end, he's taking the report on what he called a "whistle-stop tour" of businesses, residents and advocates in the neighborhood.

"I'm shopping it to different parties, to all stakeholders, the city, BBI [Bureau of Building Inspection] and public safety," he said. He presented his idea last week to the South Side Planning Forum.

He's prepared to challenge skeptics: "Someone explain to me how it helps a business district to not be clean, safe, well-managed and well-messaged," he said.

Virginia Carik, board member of South Side Community Council, said that the group advocates for residents and wants to see "more young families living on the South Side, but that's not happening."

Mr. Woll, who said the nightlife is "amazingly important" to the neighborhood economy, agrees that it has negative effects on the 5,000-plus residents. He lives in Squirrel Hill and is a sophomore at Georgetown University. "I want [the South Side] to be a place where younger people come to stay, even after school," he said.

Hired as a summer intern and tasked solely with studying government management of the entertainment economy, he searched for a model, and zeroed in on Edmonton, Canada.

Edmonton's Whyte Avenue sounded a lot like Carson Street. It's got 10 bar-soaked blocks surrounded by homes, with the University of Alberta at one end. In 2001, its image was besmirched by a drunken riot that caused tensions between visitors and residents to boil over.

The city created Responsible Hospitality Edmonton, a unit of the city manager's office guided by the principles of the Austin, Texas-based Responsible Hospitality Institute, which is a source for many of Mr. Kraus' concepts.

Edmonton treated Whyte Avenue like a facility that needed to be managed, altering garbage pick-up, street cleaning, placement of ash trays and newspaper boxes, queuing of bar customers and many other details. It changed rules so that bars could be shut down based on the accumulation of multiple types of violations -- and recently shuttered four of them. It involved young people in crafting and advertising a street slogan: "Be a lover, not a fighter."

Whyte Avenue is still busy, but "is much quieter, it's much better managed," said Jill Bradford Green, manager of Responsible Hospitality Edmonton.

That's what Mr. Kraus is after -- a system of management, like the one used to handle crowds on the North Side when the Steelers play at home

"For eight home games, there is crowd control, security, additional police, a magistrate on site to process summary offenses," said Mr. Kraus. East Carson Street has "events at a minimum of 104 times a year," he said, meaning every Friday and Saturday night, when 20,000 bar stools are in play. "Why don't we have a plan?"

That plan might include traffic and parking changes; transit tailored to Carson's evening clientele; better trash management; and nighttime building inspection and public works services.

What about a return to the police sweeps of 2007 that drove arrests up to an average of 57 per weekend?

That's not likely, since Mr. Kraus doesn't want to draw officers from the high-crime Hilltop communities.

That said, South Side could use a "dedicated policing unit" focused on planning and management, rather than just enforcement, he said.

Other cities have used police creatively in nightlife districts. Gainesville, Fla., has a police "party patrol" that responds to noise, underage drinking and other complaints endemic to the city's College Park neighborhood, next to the University of Florida. It frees up other police to handle major crimes, said city Commissioner Jeanna Mastrodicasa, who is also assistant vice president for student affairs at the university.

Boulder, Colo., has an alcohol enforcement officer who works everything from after-proms to University of Colorado fraternity parties and football games. Officer Heather Frey also tracks where arrestees had their last drink, and confronts problem bars.

Services cost money, and Mr. Kraus' report gingerly floats one solution: a business improvement district in which a special levy on establishments in a specific zone funds services tailored to that area. Oakland and Downtown already have such zones.

"There's been resistance to that, and I understand that," said Mr. Kraus. No one wants to pay extra money for services they think should be covered by regular taxes. "What's good about a BID is that it's self-managed, and it's self-governed."

The possibility of forming a business district "is clearly a point that needs to be explored," said Hugh Brannan, chair of the South Side Planning Forum, which became the first organization to view the report a week ago.

Now that the report is out, he said, "The real work is ahead of us, in terms of what we're going to do with this, and pulling folks together.

"I think the effort to bring folks together and to put together a strategy that we can begin focusing on to move forward is certainly a positive."

The report draws a "proposed entertainment district" from Heinz Field to the Strip District, past Mellon Arena to SouthSide Works, then down Carson and back across the Ohio River. Such a district could have a special "code of conduct," he said, that businesses would help promulgate.

It could also have better rules for bathrooms.

Some South Side venues "may have 600, 700 [person] occupancy, but they have two toilets. Well that's insane, if you ask me," said Mr. Kraus, author of legislation that slaps $500 or $1,000 fines on those who use the streets as a bathroom. The city shouldn't put portable toilets on historic corners, he said, but should push bars to add indoor bathrooms.

As he prepares to search for consensus on an overall plan, Mr. Kraus continues to fill what he considers gaps in the city code.

He recently introduced legislation stiffening the city fine for drinking in public -- the so-called open-container law -- making it a straight $200 fine for a first offense, $300 for a second offense, and $500 for additional violations, and eliminating district judges' discretion to impose lower penalties. That could come up for a first council vote Wednesday.

Next up: a new noise ordinance replacing the cumbersome and unenforced decibel-based rules in the city code. He wants to replace it with something simple: "If you are affecting the health, safety, well-being, quality of life of the person next to you, then basically you are in violation of the [proposed] noise ordinance," he said.

He insisted that he's not all about rules. South Side's vibrancy "is not a negative. It's a positive. ... We need to protect that, we need to enhance it, and we need to grow it."