If you're in a bar this weekend and one of these things is happening, you better keep your eyes out for L&I.
- A sign on the wall reads "Occupancy: 75" but there is at least 75 people you know there that night and another 200 you don't
- A rowdy bunch of smokers and/or drunks mulling around outside the front door
- The only smoke detectors are sitting on the bar ... being used as ashtrays.
Updated 22:39, July the 30th, 2009
City cracking down on bars: Who's next?
CENTER CITY. Last weekend it was McGlinchey's, Vesuvio Restaurant and Drinkers shut down by a roving band of police officers and city inspectors raiding bars for nuisance crimes and other violations.
The message the officials have sent is clear: If your neighborhood bar or Old City nightclub isn't following the rules, it could be next.
Eighty-five bars and nightclubs have been shuttered, most for a week or two, since April, which the leader of the Nuisance Bar Task Force said amounts to one of the city's most proactive attempts to pull bars in line in years.
The task force wields more power now than in years, according to Dominic Verdi of Licenses and Inspections, since Mayor Michael Nutter decided to put it under the authority of the police department.
"Every bar should be weary," Verdi said Thursday. "This is very proactive. We’ve been more proactive now than I can remember. And complaints could be from anywhere, Society Hill, North Philly, the Northeast."
Getting back to normal
CENTER CITY. Happy hour at Drinkers' was back to normal Thursday evening and the crowd was the perfect size, well half the perfect size, as 32 people relaxed with pints and cans of beer at about 6:30 p.m.
Several days earlier, city officials closed down the bar for having about 10 times as many patrons.
"This is a great time right now," one patron, Dan Wickner of South Philadelphia, said in between sips of a big can of Heineken. "Late night isn't bad either. It's a different atmosphere."
Like 82 of the 85 bars shut down in late-night raids by the city's Nuisance Bar Task Force since April, Drinker's has reopened.
Several blocks away, a new fire alarm was nearly installed at McGlinchey's on 15th Street. Owner Ron Sokol said the bar would be reopened in all likelihood by lunch Friday.