Neighbors to Union Hall: Shut Up!
Since opening a little over a year ago, Union Hall’s formula—booze, bands, and bocce—has been a resounding success, drawing crowds of revelers to the North Slope. Some of the bar’s neighbors wish it were a tad less successful, though. In May a group of Union Street residents sent a letter to a bunch of officials…
Since opening a little over a year ago, Union Hall’s formula—booze, bands, and bocce—has been a resounding success, drawing crowds of revelers to the North Slope. Some of the bar’s neighbors wish it were a tad less successful, though. In May a group of Union Street residents sent a letter to a bunch of officials (including Mayor Bloomberg, BP Markowitz, State Senator Montgomery and Councilmember de Blasio) regarding the tremendous increase in noise and nuisance that’d befallen their street since Union Hall opened. The letter, which was signed by 76 people, claims the quality of life for the immediate neighbors has been drastically altered, leading to sleep loss, stress, anxiety and serious health issues. The signatories said the bar’s soundproofing measures were inadequate and that its patrons have terrorized Union Street by shouting, fighting, throwing bottles, urinating and passing out on the sidewalk. Jon Crow, one of the residents leading the charge against the bar, showed up at Wednesday night’s Community Board 6 meeting to expound on Union Hall’s alleged ne’er-do-well ways and to ask for the board’s help in bringing peace and quiet back to Union Street. From the outside, it may look like a library, but it’s not, said Crow, who intends to lobby the state liquor board so that Union Hall’s booze license isn’t renewed this spring.
The Skinny on Union Hall [Brownstoner] GMAP
Just a bunch of crabby old people with nothing better to do. Go get a life.
2:50 is right. Talk to a business directly if you’d like them to do more, but please reward a business that does make an effort to be conscientious. Otherwise what’s their reward for trying so hard and what on earth will encourage them to do it again, at the next business they open?
But Union Hall SHOULD get credit for minimizing their impact on the neighbors. Check out the place before you judge or make blanket statements about bars’ impact on neighborhoods. Bands play in the basement, and they keep the windows closed. They are in a building without residents and at least on one side, there are no residents. They way they created the smoking area minimizing second-hand smoke and noise on the street. They are near a major commercial strip and a subway which attract crowds regardless of their existence. Plus, Union St. has never been a bucolic idyll. I live on Union and 8th and street noise (cars, sirens, drunks passing) is a fact of life. There are people in Park Slope that will be unhappy with ANYTHING. I’m sure nothing the bar could do would satisfy the petitioners, and if UH wasn’t there, there would be something else for them to get their panties in a bunch about. A conscientious business deserves the right to exist and serve the neighborhood!
76 people does not a petition make.
Sorry.
Again, it is not about 1) the type of music 2) the level the music is played at 3) the soundproofing of any basement. The most aggravating noise for residents who live in a neighborhood in which a new bar/evening venue opens up is often the noise of the patrons…patrons going back and forth in the street, calling out to friends, talking like it’s 1PM on a Midtown street, screaming “Oh, my G-d!!! I was like so…” or “Dude, was’goin’on?!” into cellphones. Not that the Union Hall crowd is necessarily a particularly overexcited type…but if you’re one of the boosters on this thread, more into a place with your bedroom facing a store across the street and hope a bar takes over the space…make sure the tenant upstairs does aerobics and that the part-time DJ downstairs forgets, though he agreed a number of times, to use his headset when he’s testing out mixing ideas and ends up vibrating your apartment to Kingdom Come.
Listen, all you “Well then go back Cuba!”/”Get out of NYC” flingers: First of all ya’ sound like Archie Bunkers. Second of all, who says the burbs are so quiet and peaceful…talk about a place people gripe! The burbs can be horrible. Neighbors are often at each others’ throats: “Mom, why don’t you go over to that nice couple that just moved in?” “Honey, I don’t even say hello to that lady. Do you know what she had the nerve to come over and say to me a week after they moved in?!…” How many of us have heard this from burb-living family?
My mother-in-law is experiencing problems from the other end of the day: somehow, all the parents nearby decided to use her house which is on a corner and has a stone wall as the meeting place for their kids’ over-priced private mini-school bus to pick them up…not infront of the house of one of the families that has a kid in the school. My m-i-l is not young, has no need to get up early (and is kind of ghastly if she does! LOL!). She hates it but doesn’t want to appear to be the “mean old lady”…plus she is kind of scared to confront the parents but now, every morning she lies in bed listening to kids running and screeching all over the place, yuppy parents blabbing at full blast and not supervising their kids much so they’re using the stone wall as a balancing beam, etc. Do I hear “insurance problem” anyone. Plus, the kids do a certain amount of damage on the lawn, wall and her elaborately planted front yard.
Basically, what I’m saying is consideration is needed anywhere you live/go/get services/get entertained. In a residential or mixed use block in Brooklyn, wouldn’t it make sense that if people seem to be impacted enough to complain and sign a petition, the owners of a private business had better make a real effort to minimize the impact their money-making has on the residents?
And…by the way, I’m going to stay overnight at my mother-in-law’s some point and let the yuppies have a piece of my mind one school morning. 😉
So basically what you’re saying, 2:12, is that we should close Union Hall and the Habana Outpost.
These are two of the most unique, exciting, and interesting places not only in Brooklyn, but in the whole city.
Seriously? Complaining about Habana Outpost? That place is universally loved!
And all this talk about loudness at 3am just doesn’t garner any pity. Bars close at 4. if you have loudness at 4:30 or 5am, then it’s time to complain.
See post at 2:31.
I have had this experience as well. They are extremely aware and courteous of the neighbors.
I think those 76 people (or 76 signatures by the same old bag) need to go talk to the folks at Union Hall. You know…TALK?
Not just sign some silly petition.
Seems like the consensus is that posters in this blog think that living in NYC gives you the right to be an ass. So this place has carte blanche to make noise and irritate neighbors so that it can make $$$ by selling drinks?
Walking by Union Hall last weekend at 2AM–my friend and I peeked in the front windows and started were deciding on whether to go in our not. A bouncer came out within two minutes, and told us we needed to make sure we were not loitering and talking in front of the place. Nicely invited us in or asked us to move on so that we wouldn’t bother the neighbors.
Seems to me like they are trying hard to be good to the block.