Around 10:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, the cops showed up at Club
Pop—a biweekly 18-and-over electronic-and-rock-music dance night
at Chop Suey—and told them that they were being too loud,
according to Chop Suey management. The sound engineer turned it down a
bit, but the booming bass of songs like Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.” crept
back up. At around 12:30 a.m., 15 minutes into the set of their
national headliner Tim Sweeney, the cops showed up a second time and
demanded they turn it down again. When Chop Suey complied, at least
half of the night’s 240 paying customers left, after having paid $10
for tickets. (By press time, The Stranger was not able to get
a police report from that night.)
“The thing about this kind of [electronic] music is that when people
go out to hear it, they are paying for a great sound system. Otherwise,
they could just listen to it in their bedroom,” says Club Pop promoter
Michael Yuasa. The end-of-night exodus didn’t surprise him. “If you
can’t feel the bass in your chest, no one wants to dance.”
In the past couple of weeks, clubs along south Capitol Hill between
Broadway and 15th Avenue say they’ve noticed an increase in visits from
city and state officials. Considering the area’s longtime reputation
for nightlife activity and its relative distance from any housing, the
reported rash of officers touring clubs and telling businesses to
reduce noise is strange. Especially since there are no current rules
regulating the decibels a club puts out.
Neumo’s, a nearby nightclub, says it’s been visited many times
lately by the police, the liquor board, the city attorney’s office, and
the fire department. “During the month of March, we’ve been visited by
Seattle police two or three times a week,” says co-owner Steven
Severin. “Sometimes they come back twice in a night, and twice they
have come in with five officers.” He reports the city told him that
Neumo’s was also being visited by undercover police.
Attributing the increased attention to recent violence on Capitol
Hill, the police department simply said: “SPD should be in the
establishments checking with owners and looking for issue or
violations”; the liquor board said that it’s been to Neumo’s four times
since the beginning of February—twice to respond to written
complaints and once at the behest of the club. Overall, they consider
Neumo’s to be a “good licensee.” City Attorney Tom Carr and Council
Member Nick Licata’s office (which oversees the nightlife committee)
say that their offices have no direct focus on any of the south Capitol
Hill club strip.
Severin is still confused about the noise rules and the police
presence. “They’ve told us that Neumo’s is too loud, but we are asking,
‘what is too loud?'” The current rules for noise come from the Seattle
Municipal Code, which bars “loud and raucous, frequent, repetitive
noise,” from an amplified or unamplified source—there are no
decibel standards, and no difference between a nightlife establishment
and a house party. If it sounds noisy, cops can demand it be turned
down.
Neumo’s is in a relative dead zone for housing—there are no
residential units within a block of the club, and the closest ones are
above another nightlife establishment, the Wildrose. “Without an actual
decibel-meter reading, we’re not going to turn it down,” Severin says.
“If we are breaking [a] law, then we’ll turn it down.”
Chop Suey owner John Villesvik says that every time the police have
shown up, the employees have asked for a noise reading so that they can
compare it with their own in order to monitor their own noise. In the
eight visits from police they say they’ve had since March 13, they’ve
never received a reading. “We want to establish a baseline so we can
compare and keep our noise down to a nonsubjective level,” says
Villesvik. “Right now, [the police] are making a judgment call. It’s a
puzzle for us.” When the officers showed up to Chop Suey last Thursday,
they reportedly weren’t carrying a decibel meter. “Our sound person
took a measurement with our decibel reader and asked to compare it to
the officer’s,” says Yuasa. “The officer said that she left her meter
in her locker that night.”
On June 1, the new nightlife ordinance will go into effect which
will make it “unlawful for a person to have allowed to originate noise
from the property that is audible from inside the residence of a person
of normal hearing.” Chop Suey is covering its bases. It is installing a
few thousand dollars of structural improvements, and swapping out some
of the sound equipment, which it rents. “With the new ordinance coming
in, we’re upgrading our sound system to be ready,” says Villesvik. The
upgrades should “sound exactly the same inside the club, but have a
shorter throw, so the sound doesn’t go as far outside.” 