Put too many drunks in too small a space and you'll wind up with a pair of problems: A little bit of violence and an awful lot of public urination.
Intoxicated idiots who fight with each other and pee all over the place can be found in any city with a vibrant club scene. When the clubs in question are concentrated in downtown business districts or desolate industrial areas, that doesn't create a public policy issue.
But there are many North American cities where bright neon veins of clubs and cafés extend through otherwise quiet residential neighbourhoods, creating conflict between bar-goers and homeowners.
Sometimes, the clubs were there first. Last summer in Toronto, liquor inspectors and noise bylaw officers cracked down on bars and clubs on funky College Street after complaints from nearby condo residents -- most of whom had just moved into new buildings on adjacent streets.
According to the Toronto Star, authorities and residents alike were concerned College Street, which at one point was Toronto's version of Little Italy, would spiral out of control to become an uptown version of the city's Entertainment District, which had been plagued by violence and homicides.
But the College Street pattern is not typical. Normally, club districts emerge in residential neighbourhoods and not the other way around.
The usual mechanism is gentrification, as an influx of young people into older neighbourhoods inspires entrepreneurs to open shops and cafés wherever zoning regulations allow them to do so.
The resulting strip of activity then attracts even more young people, leading many of those same entrepreneurs -- and some less scrupulous new ones -- to ponder the economic benefits of switching from peddling retail goods or running restaurants to the more profitable practice of pouring booze.
Often, the results are invigorating. In Vancouver, a hodgepodge of ethnic restaurants along Commercial Drive has invigorated a once-sketchy stretch of the city's notorious East Side. In Montreal, the upscale shops of Rue Saint-Denis have utterly transformed The Plateau.
But cities also find it can be tough to balance the growth of commercial strips in residential areas, especially once clubs get a toe-hold.
Last summer in Edmonton, a minor brouhaha broke out when the city decided to place "open-air public urinals" on Whyte Avenue, the popular club-and-shopping district in the Old Strathcona neighbourhood.
According to the Edmonton Journal, some residents felt the porta-potties represented a capitulation to the drunkards who terrorize the area after the bars on Whyte Avenue close down. But the porta-potties are coming back this summer, as Edmonton's city council has determined the visual annoyance is worth the public-sanitation benefit.
By now, it's obvious there are some parallels between College Street, Whyte Avenue and Winnipeg's own problem child of a residential commercial strip -- Corydon Avenue, which teetered on the edge of overheating several summers ago.
From 2003 to 2006, residents living on surrounding streets showed up at city hall to oppose the granting of any new liquor licences along the busiest stretch of Corydon. They complained of club-goers urinating on lawns, vomiting into trash cans and shouting obscenities at 2:30 a.m.
The Corydon-area residents did not win every battle, but the city's Board of Adjustment and the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission have kept a close eye on the avenue. Bar Italia, the strip's most storied watering hole, was denied a cabaret licence, while an entrepreneur who wanted to convert what used to be Roca Jack's coffee house into a restaurant-bar was told to take a hike.
The latter space is now Fresh Café, a popular breakfast spot that has proved to be a major benefit to the area. And Bar Italia is up for sale, although one of the managers plans to open a new spot further west on the Corydon strip.
Overall, Corydon Avenue's growth has been managed relatively well, despite the fact that the stretch has lost almost all of its former hipness, as many of the bohemians who fueled the gentrification process in the early '90s have fled the strip.
Despite the occasional headline, violence is not a serious problem. The most shocking recent incident -- the broad-daylight beating of prominent businessman Joe Bova -- did not have anything to do with club-goers.
And there are no plans at city hall to bring porta-potties to the strip, through public urination remains a complaint of residents on adjacent Jessie and McMillan avenues.
But some of those same residents moved to the strip precisely because they like to drink on outdoor patios.
When it comes to gentrification, you can't have your urinal cake and eat it, too.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
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