Superblock bar owners in Myrtle Beach say city targeting them with latest moratorium, extra police visits

Bar and nightclub owners in the Superblock were getting nervous last month when they heard Myrtle Beach City Council had passed its second ban and fourth law in three years regulating downtown bars – this time specifically in their block.

Unlike the first three council decisions, the latest moratorium banned all new drinking establishments in the 6-acre Superblock bound by Ninth Avenue North, Broadway Street, U.S. 501 and Main Street. Also referred to as Five Points, the old block is home to a few shops, a café, the Downtown Redevelopment Corp., a comic book store, a video production company, a law office and seven bars.

Several storefronts remain vacant and the block has earned a reputation for criminal activity – a bad image business owners say they are trying to clean up.

Council members say their actions were necessary to help them rein in violent crimes at clubs that lead the headlines and scare off tourists. But the successive city actions lead the bar owners -- who say they feel trapped with no prospective buyers now to sell their businesses to if they wanted to – wondering what’s next.

“I need to run my business. I cannot be thinking what new idea they’re going to have in two weeks,” said Hector Melendez inside his Pure Ultra Club at 803 Main St. “When they (city council members) come back after the holidays what other ideas are they going to have in mind?”

The council passed its first moratorium in January 2013, freezing business licenses to any new clubs or bars that planned to serve more than 150 patrons within the 314-acre downtown district. The moratorium came with no end date, and Mayor John Rhodes says he doesn’t plan to pursue lifting it now.

A year later, to address problems city leaders said were occurring in bar scenes along Ocean Boulevard, the council approved a new law requiring all bars and nightclubs in the city to have a written safety plan. The plan had to address things like crowd control, unruly patrons and parking lot behavior and owners had to agree they would not permit nudity, semi-nudity or events like wet T-shirt contests.

In September – seven months after a man was shot to death leaving the former Club Levelz in the Superblock at 2:30 a.m. – the council passed another law. The ordinance requires all clubs to close at 2 a.m. on the nights bar owners turn over their establishments to outside promoters for special events. Levelz was using a disc jockey for a special event the night the man was killed.

Then on Oct. 27, City Council enacted a new moratorium: no new bars or nightclubs for the Superblock until Jan. 1, 2017 to give the city’s planning commission time to study the issue of how many bars should be allowed in one place.

Patrick Brody -- an agent of JB & HM Enterprises Inc., which owns the building where the Pure Ultra Club operates -- called the measure of honing in on one block an “illegal” act of “spot zoning.”

Brody said property owners were never notified the moratorium was even being considered. City Council decided to table its second reading of the ordinance until the council’s meeting Tuesday to make sure all property owners are informed.

But the city’s first approval of the ordinance already set the ban on licenses in motion and business owners say that the ban isn’t their only trouble with the city. Owners of Pure Ultra Club and Natalia’s Bar and Grill say they have been hounded by police walking through their establishments to check them out sometimes on a nightly basis. Both say the police’s presence has driven customers away and they feel like they are being unfairly targeted.

“We’re not targeting them other than to make it safe for everybody. There have been some problems in that area and when we find problems we try to fix them,” said Councilwoman Susan Grissom Means.

Burdened by crime?

Leaders say their regulations of bars and nightclubs stemmed from criminal activity, and a recent shooting in the Superblock didn’t help matters.

Police say Superblock property owner Shai David shot at another businessman who court records showed he had real estate dealings with at 4:47 p.m. Nov. 17. Bullet holes marred the back of Tom Tom Glass Studio, a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. business in the block that operates at 807 N. Kings Highway. Blood stained the business’ back door step the morning after the shooting.

David had purchased three buildings in the Superblock, including the site of the new Ibiza Club & Hooka Lounge. Councilman Randal Wallace said David had great plans to renovate and inject new life into the block. But David now faces an attempted murder charge.

It was the second shooting in the block this year.

The Myrtle Beach Police Department said its officers responded to the Superblock 717 times from midnight to 6 a.m. June 1 through Oct. 26. Only 11 of the incidents – six assaults, one criminal domestic violence offense, three fights and one shooting – fit the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s description of violent crime. The exact addresses of the events were not provided. Of the 717 events, 249 were from police dropping by the Superblock to check on the businesses or to provide public assistance, not responding to a call.

Brody stepped up to the platform before Myrtle Beach City Council Nov. 10 and slammed down a nearly foot-tall stack of papers that spilled onto the floor around him.

The papers held proof found in crime reports, he said, that showed the areas in the city with the most incidences of crime are not the ones being picked on by the license moratorium.

Increased patrols?

Music pumped from the speakers and lights flickered in a rhythmic beat at Natalia’s Bar and Grill on the night of Nov. 10. The new business opened three months ago.

Natalia’s owner, Natalie Litsey, says she hasn’t had a need to call the police, but they show up anyway.

On Nov. 9, she said, officers came in three times. On their third visit, the bar was hosting a group of customers, who had just attended a funeral. The bar had netted $150 worth of sales in an hour from the crowd, before the police showed up the last time that night.

One of the officers “came up to one of the customers and they said, ‘you look like somebody we’ve been looking for,’” Litsey recalled. She told them to take it outside.

“We lost all the customers,” she said.

Natalia’s closed early for the night.

Whenever officers spot a large crowd at an event or a bar, police have to check it out, said Lt. Joey Crosby with Myrtle Beach Police.

If there’s a large crowd, we’ll do a “keep check on the parking lot and may do a walk-through on the inside to make sure nobody is being unruly,” he said.

“Our intent is never to harass anyone. Our intent is to create a visible presence to ensure that … we’re being a deterrent for potential criminal activity and to also address any activity that may be happening and to also fulfill the community policing philosophy” of the department, he said. “We encourage our officers to engage with the public. … We encourage officers to build relationships so the citizens feel comfortable.”

But Litsey said her bar hasn’t been open long enough to draw big crowds; officers stopped by again last week. “There weren’t that many customers to scare away at that time,” she added.

Litsey and her staff are making notes of each visit and the questions officers ask.

One block down, neon lights and pulsing music beckoned patrons to Pure Ultra, where Melendez says his staff is also making notes.

“Welcome to my home,” Melendez said, as he pushed open a door to reveal a plush and posh interior that he said took him 14 months to create from the chaos he first encountered in the space.

Melendez removed 17 26-foot-long dumpsters full of litter from the squatters he said lived there between the time the C&C Furniture business closed and he moved in. He started his renovation removing beer bottles, drug paraphernalia and tons of cigarette butts that he said could have burned the building to the ground long before he arrived.

“It’s painful for what I went through to put this place together,” he said. “I gutted the entire building… and I started from scratch.”

Melendez had plans to renovate the building’s second floor, adding a rooftop bar and wiping away the signs of the mess that still remains upstairs, but he put those plans on hold as the city created the new rules and moratorium.

“I’m not going to spend one more penny here,” he said. “I’ll just hold the horses because you don’t know what these people really want.”

Melendez said his business was getting almost nightly visits from police, even though he hasn’t had to call them for an incident since he opened in August 2014.

“The one who should be giving you protection, is the one who’s intimidating you,” he said.

Counting visits

The extra police visits made bar owners nervous after they learned nearly half of the calls for police service mentioned in a hearing to close Jimmagan’s Pub were just when police decided to drop by. Police cited 127 “calls” to the 6003 N. Kings Highway pub from Jan. 1, 2014 to Oct. 14, 2015 in their case to prove the business had become a public nuisance. Forty-nine of the visits were for “keep checks” and walk-throughs during which no crimes were reported.

Jimmagan’s agreed to close at 1 a.m. and the state’s case against the business was dropped a few days after the hearing.

Councilman Wallace said the keep checks shouldn’t be counted against the businesses in public nuisance cases. “I don’t think that’s particularly fair,” he said.

But he also didn’t think it was fair to force all bars in the city to close at 2 a.m. – a measure the council has long debated.

“We have a disproportionate number of people in the city” that have to work late and can’t head to the bar until midnight or later, Wallace said.

“You walk in there and that’s who’s there and it’s just like happy hour at the golf club. No problems, no issues,” he said.

Forcing all businesses to close at 2 a.m. because of a handful that cause the problems, would put five or six of the establishments that have no problems out of business, he said.

We’re “trying to address these issues that happen in the middle of the night without doing that,” he said.

This story was originally published December 5, 2015 at 3:28 PM with the headline "Superblock bar owners in Myrtle Beach say city targeting them with latest moratorium, extra police visits."