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Dive Bars and the Ghost Ship Fire

Dive Bars and the Ghost Ship Fire

Last updated on: December 8, 2016 at 2:44 am by Tom Swiss

Dive Bars and the Ghost Ship Fire 2016-12-08T02:44:21-04:00 Tom Swiss

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This week’s Random Wednesday is a little less random, a contemplation about two types of spaces that have something in common that’s hard to explain: dive bars and DIY art spaces.

The gentrification of Baltimore has overtaken my favorite dive bar. Sunday night I found myself in the upscale cocktail bar that has replaced the old classic Fells Point music dive Leadbetter’s. A hipster bartender mixed some sort of flaming concoction (shades of Flaming Moe’s from The Simpsons) while one of Baltimore’s best known DJs set up his CD players and mini laser light show in the corner where I spent hundreds of hours playing guitar. I was often playing to a nearly empty bar (with the notable exception of one dramatic Tuesday), and I was paid a pittance, but I was a professional musician.

But they have kept the old wooden bar; it’s been sanded and refinished but I knew it as soon as I walked in the place.

It is almost as if a new temple to Dionysus was built on the site of an old one, but kept the old altar.

I do not say that to exaggerate or mock. A tavern, a pub, a wine-shop, these are sacred places, though we practice the faith poorly in this nation for the most part. (I enter into evidence the beer that rebranded itself “America” over the summer.)

But Leadbetter’s was, at it’s peak, a musician’s bar. (Heck, it was named after a bluesman so legendary he sung his way out of prison twice.) They proudly advertised live music EFN — Every F’ing Night — with an early set and a late set, each four hours long, most nights. Musicians playing at other Fell’s Point bars would run in during their set breaks for a shot.

Photo credited to Rick Lee James via the Leadbetters Facebook page. Fair use.

I submit that this combination of booze and music made it a temple for both Dionysus and Apollo.

But capitalism has little use for the sacred or for art. (I would fain argue that all art is sacred, but that’s a tangential rant.) Thus, the gentrification of art spaces and communities.

Which takes us to the tragic “Ghost Ship” fire in Oakland, and the crackdown on DIY art spaces it seems to be provoking across the country

I’ve never lived in a warehouse space like the Ghost Ship — I freely admit to being a white suburban punk — but friends of mine have. I’ve danced in these places, performed in them, crashed in them after late-night parties. I’m certain that at least some of them lacked the official blessing of the Baltimore City government.

There have been and will be many such spaces here, the misguided efforts of the city government to destroy the DIY arts scene notwithstanding.

For example, see the city’s eviction of the residents of the Bell Foundry in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire. The city claims it took this action out of concern for safety; but unless the building was about to fall down on their heads I have a hard time seeing how violations of building codes (created arbitrarily by for-profit entities and then incorporated wholesale into law, a most undemocratic process, but that’s another tangential rant) posed a more imminent danger to the people living there than an immediate eviction does.

There was no advance notice, no ninety days to find a new place, no effort to work with tenants and owners to create safer conditions, no hearings, no appeals process. People were just kicked out into the December streets by gun-toting bureaucrats.

The Bell Foundry is in the Station North district, an area currently undergoing a lot of “redevelopment”. Given Baltimore City’s recent history of raining bullshit down on the DIY arts scene (which included shutting down an outdoor event in a waterfront park on the pretense of fire code violations) I’ll put my money on this being the city government taking advantage of the Ghost Ship fire to clear the way for more profitable development.

Building codes provide an excellent means of social control. Cities can let artists move into distressed areas and start rebuilding them while easing up on enforcement. Then once developers are ready to swoop in, code enforcement officers are shocked, shocked, to find artists living in unapproved spaces.

(In focusing on artists, I am discussing only one aspect of gentrification and development. It’s not my intent to ignore or deny the huge issues of race involved here. But I open one can of worms at a time, and start with those closest to me.)

Let’s consider the lesson this eviction teaches other people living in underground art spaces in Baltimore. If someone living in one of those buildings had a concern about safety, they now know that calling city officials about it would quite likely end with them and their friends getting evicted.

Policy choices by the city government have created an adversarial relationship between the DIY arts community, and an adversarial relationship can never be a protective one.

It’s much like the way that making drugs illegal makes it unlikely for a user to report a seller of impure heroin to the authorities. Prohibition doesn’t work. Authoritarian progressivism only drives things out of sight and makes disasters more likely.

To deal with social problems of all sorts, we need collaborative harm reduction policies, not harsh criminalization.

Worth reading:

It Could Have Been Any One of Us” by Gabe Meline, KQED Arts’ Online Editor:

Outsiders reporting on the tragedy inevitably get it all wrong: they mischaracterize the party as a rave, the music as EDM, and implicitly criminalize the victims as attendees of an illegal event. Hours after the fire, the tragedy is politicized.

How can we explain?

They don’t understand why we don’t just live in a $3,000/mo. apartment where everything is safe and sterile and clean; why we live in a warehouse, or a garage, or an attic or shed or laundry room; why there is a mattress on the floor with a space heater where there normally would be a Queen size bed with a duvet and a nightstand and central heating.

…

They don’t understand that we do not fit into the boxes the world tries to sell us. That their world is unacceptable, and that even for all the ragged edges, we need our own world on our own terms.
“Preventing Another Oakland Warehouse Tragedy Means Supporting Artists, Not Punishing Them” by Sophie Weiner, Village Voice:

When the government continually closes the few spaces that manage to make it through the labyrinth of bureaucracy to open legally, it provides young people few options but to take matters into their own hands by running illegal spaces….

Considering this, our governments and regulatory bodies should end their dangerous campaign to shut down venues and instead start working with promoters and fans to make arts spaces safe for everyone.

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