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NYC'S Blue Laws


 

When the Harlem store Palace Liquors opened one particular day this week, it was a moment that some New Yorkers had wanted for more than three centuries. That is because the day it opened was Sunday. New York liquor stores have never before been allowed to open on Sunday.

But at Sanchez Liquors farther uptown, the shutters remained drawn. “Sunday is the day for resting,” said shopkeeper Francisco Calcaño. “Besides, if the store is closed, that means less liquor on the streets on a Sunday, when people are walking with their families.”

The long-standing ban on Sunday liquor sales was lifted as part of the state legislature’s budget package. The lawmakers reasoned that allowing liquor stores to open on Sunday (even though they will have to choose another day to close each week) will mean more alcohol sales, and more taxes and fees for the state’s coffers.

Some may think that this finally means an end to what are called the blue laws, which have regulated Americans’ moral behavior, especially what people can or cannot do on a Sunday, since the 17th century. Things certainly have changed since the time when even a Sunday baseball game was considered immoral -- and outlawed.

Indeed, the people opposed to allowing liquor to be sold on Sundays seldom even mention the word morality. Governor Pataki vetoed the Sunday liquor sales bill, but it was unlikely that he vetoed the law for moral reasons, especially considering his substitute proposal to raise funds for the city -- installing video slot machines in the city’s off track betting parlors. In any case, the legislature overrode Pataki’s veto.

Still, blue laws have not now faded into the quaint past. There are still laws regulating people’s private lives or freedom of choice – and not only ones that are outdated and unenforced. Some would say that there is at least one new one, promoted by our billionaire bachelor mayor – a prohibition on smoking indoors.

HISTORY OF BLUE LAWS

New York’s law banning liquor sales on Sunday has its origins in Puritan America and even the Roman Empire. “The earliest indication that I was able to uncover about a specific law prohibiting activity on Sunday comes from the Roman emperor Constantine in the year 321,” said David Laband, author of Blue Laws: The History, Economics, and Politics of Sunday Closing Laws. The law reads in part, Laband said, “Let all judges, and all city people, and all tradesmen, rest upon the venerable day of the sun.”

Regulations against Sunday activities were in place in King Charles the Second’s England, as well as in the seventeenth-century Puritan colonies in America. Many reference books say that the laws were called “blue” because they were printed on blue paper, but historians have said that the term is more likely to be derived from the use of the word “blue” to mean “rigidly moral.”

A 1695 colonial New York blue law read, “Be it therefore enacted that there shall be no traveling, servile laboring and working, shooting, fishing, sporting, playing, horseracing, hunting, or frequenting of tippling houses, or the use of any other unlawful exercises or pastimes, by any of the inhabitants or sojourners within this province, or by any of their slaves or servants, on the Lord’s day.” The punishment for any of these offenses was a fine of six shillings or three hours in the stocks.

Other colonies had even stiffer blue laws. If someone broke Virginia’s Sunday restrictions three times, they faced the death penalty. In colonial Boston, Captain John Kemble was arrested and put in stocks for two hours for kissing his wife on the Sunday that he returned home from three years at sea. In 1789, President George Washington was on his way from Connecticut to attend church in New York when he was charged with a blue law violation for unnecessarily walking or riding on Sunday.

In New York, regulations against Sunday activities continued into the next century, as upstate (largely Protestant) Republican lawmakers supported laws that did not make sense for the Jewish and Catholic residents of New York City. The sale of liquor on Sundays was prohibited, and both professional and amateur baseball games were against the law. By the1890s, “there was a long tradition in the New York legislature of enacting legislation to enforce morality in the city, wrote Christopher Finan in Al Smith: The Happy Warrior, his biography of the1920s governor. “The interference of upstate Republicans in both the administration of New York City and the social life of its citizens was deeply resented.”

In 1907, New York City Democrats unsuccessfully introduced two bills in Albany to change the law prohibiting baseball on Sundays. Then-state Assemblyman Al Smith, according to Finan, spoke out against the Sunday ban on the floor of the state legislature, saying that it was better for young men to be playing baseball than “be driven to places where they play “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.’”

In 1917, the New York Giants and Cincinnatti Reds played the first Sunday major league baseball game at the Polo Grounds. The managers of both teams were arrested for violating the blue laws. Sunday games became legal in New York two years later, but the bar on Sunday liquor sales became an all out ban during prohibition. A new law banning Sunday sales was drafted at the end of the prohibition era, and survived until this month.

LIQUOR STORES ON SUNDAY

The new law doesn’t do away with the state’s blue laws completely. New York’s liquor stores may be able to open on Sundays, but will have to close one other day a week. Mark Anderson, deputy commissioner of the New York State Liquor Authority, said that in order to enforce the one-day-a-week closing, he expects that each store will need to include the day that they will close each week in their license. The law will sunset in five years, so Sunday sales may be banned again. It also limits the number of state liquor licenses to the ones currently in place. Grocery stores are still not allowed to sell wine, and can only sell beer on Sundays after noon.

Liquor store groups have lobbied on both sides of the issue. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, which lobbied hard for a lift of the Sunday ban in New York, sponsored a study finding that Sunday openings could bring in an extra $26.7 million a year in taxes and fees for New York State, because Sunday has become a big shopping day. “This is all about choices,” said Lisa Hawkins from the Distilled Spirits Council, who once told Business Review that she should have the right to “have margaritas with my fajitas on Sunday night.”

Small owner-run liquor stores have often campaigned to keep Sunday closings, saying that they don’t have the staff to open every day, but would be forced to open in order to compete with larger stores.

The new law answers some of their concerns, by mandating that all stores close at least one day a week. Francisco Maracallo, the manager of the Washington Heights store Sandy Liquor, is looking forward to the good sales that he thinks Sunday will bring, and hopes to work out a plan with other liquor stores in the neighborhood, so that each one closes on a different day.

Religious groups have said that not only does banning liquor sales on Sunday limit alcohol abuse, it is a way to preserve the &#14

Litigation Over World Trade Center Clean-Up Payments


Within hours after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the New York City Department of Design and Constructionagreed with four main contractors to begin the daunting clean-up. Due to the severity of the situation the department was unable to follow its typical construction contract guidelines. Most importantly, the department did not sign a written contract setting prices for how much money it would pay the contractors and their subcontractors for the work. To date, the department and the four main contractors have not inked a final contract as several issues, including liability insurance, remain in dispute.

When clean-up of the site ended on May 30, 2002, the department began reviewing subcontractors’ invoices and bills for the work they had already done and amounting to over $650 million. Without a written contract setting specific prices for specific jobs, the department is left to determine which bills to pay and at which rates. As the department determines that a particular invoice is excessive and decides not to pay the invoice, there no doubt promises to be subcontractors who will challenge that determination. In what may be the first of many to come, on April 29, 2003 New York County Supreme CourtJustice Diane S. Lebedeff decided that the department has the authority to review and reduce invoices that it deems excessive.

Subcontractor Submitted High Invoice

Tully Construction, Co., one of the four main contractors, had been working on a major State Department of Transportation construction project on lower Route 9A (West Street) on September 11th and was one of the first at the site. Tully, like all of the main contractors, entered into agreements with subcontractors for equipment. One of those agreements was with Massachusetts-based Great Northern Site Corporation for the lease of three (and later four) heavy excavating machines.

Tully and Great Northern agreed that Great Northern would be paid approximately $189 per hour per machine, amounting to approximately $100,000 per machine per month.

Shortly after the machines were delivered to the site, Tully and Great Northern agreed that the rates for the excavating machines would be subject to the Department of Design and Construction’s approval.

By June 2002 the department had issued two memos stating that subcontractors would be paid for their work at a rate of 75 percent of the rate found in the construction industry’s standardized suggested price index, the “Rental Rate Blue Book for Construction Equipment.” The Department would only pay above 75 percent of the Blue Book rate if the subcontractor could provide documentation indicating that the rate was “usual and reasonable pre-September 11, 2001.” The policy, the department stated, was to prevent “’opportunities for unscrupulous individuals to enrich themselves’ in the wake of September 11th.”

Great Northern’s charge for each of its machines at $189 per hour rate came in at approximately $45 per hour higher than the Blue Book rate for similar machines. So the department asked Great Northern for proof that it charged as much per hour before September 11th. When Great Northern failed to submit the documents the city had requested, the department reduced the company’s rate to $108 per hour.

Great Northern sued. It claimed the city agency did not have the authority to change the company’s rates, since the equipment was being put to use on property of the Port Authority, which was created by the States of New York and New Jersey. It said it was entitled to a public hearing, because the city had created a new rule.

Justice Lebedeff dismissed Great Northern’s complaint on April 29, rejecting all its arguments. The city had a right to take reasonable steps to make sure it is not overcharged, the judge ruled, and could so on the site owned by the Port Authority because the September 11th attacks “affected an area far beyond the site.”

Controlling The Floodgates

Justice Lebedeff’s decision has the potential to save the city millions of dollars in overpayment and/or fraud. The city is currently reviewing millions of dollars in unreconciled invoices billed from the World Trade Center clean-up. Pursuant to Justice Lebedeff’s decision the Department has the authority to review these invoices and ensure that the city is not overpaying or paying false claims.

In reviewing the invoices the Department has been working with the Department of Investigations and an auditor, KPMG, who will supplement the auditing staff to reconcile paperwork and then provide it to the Federal Emergency Managementbefore the end of the year. Upon FEMA’s review, the city will be reimbursed for its payments.

As the department makes a determination as to the appropriate rate in each of these invoices, there promises to be litigation, which could prolong the end of the clean-up phase and put off the development.

Great Northern Site Corporation v. Department of Design and Construction, Index No. 122546/02 (Lebedeff, J.) (N.Y.Cty.Sup.Ct.) (Apr. 29, 2002).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Look At Nightclub Mayhem


New Yorkers who think that the city has seen a lot of murders this year are right. Police department statistics(in pdf format) show that 151 people were murdered in the five boroughs between January 1 and April 13, up from 138 over the same period last year. This 9.4 percent year-to-date increase in murders parallels a 6.2 percent increase in rape. The city has had 561 reported rapes so far this year, up from 528 last year. Other major crimes have declined: felonious assault is down 9.8 percent through mid-April, and burglary and grand larceny auto are both down 15.2 percent. The rise in murder is particularly worrisome to analysts, however, because it is the one crime that everyone agrees to be recorded accurately.

MURDER UP

It has been a murderous few weeks. February 8 was the first night of a murder spree that killed four men (a fifth was wounded) in Brooklyn and Queens. Saying he had targeted Middle Easterners to avenge September 11, a Brooklyn man confessed and was indicted on multiple counts by a grand jury on April 11. On April 13, Dana Blake, a bouncer at Guernica on Avenue B, was stabbed to death after a melee involving smokers. A Guernica patron confessed, and has been charged. On April 24, Lyric Benson, a beautiful, 22-year-old aspiring actress, was shot to death in front of her apartment by her former fiancé as her mother, who had opened the door for her, looked on in horror. The fiancé then turned the gun on himself.

In the early morning of April 25, a rap star and his entourage got into a violent argument with a car full of apparent strangers following a traffic accident outside Centro-Fly, a hip-hop club at 45 West 21st Street. Rapper Freaky Zeeky was shot twice and run over by a car. His bodyguard was killed. "This has nothing to do with rap," a man who called himself a close friend toldthe New York Times. "Just two groups of men who got into trouble."

But the two groups of men got into trouble because they had driven to Chelsea to go clubbing.

NEW YORK'S TROUBLED NIGHTLIFE

Residents of Chelsea have complained for years about the proliferation of nightclubs in their neighborhood. Even as many notorious clubs have been shut down, the hip-hop clubs that have opened around the Flatiron Building have added new problems to the old. Certainly the mix of alcohol, drugs, and late-night partying is volatile, and few neighborhoods want drug- and alcohol-fueled youngsters roaming their streets.

The Bloomberg administration has continued the Giuliani administration's campaign against nightclub violations. After a 22-month drug investigation, the NYPD closed two clubson February 7-the Sound Factory, at 616-620 West 46th Street, and Exit, at 610 West 56th Street.

The police said both clubs had flourishing drug trades, particularly in Ecstasy (methylenedioxy methamphetamine or MDMA) and Special K (ketamine), but also in cocaine and marijuana.

Exit was re-opened March 21 by order of a judge, who reprimanded the police for wasting "tremendous resources" on a "less-than-productive probe." The police are very angry, according to the Daily News, the only paper to cover the reopening of the "drug-fueled dens."

But Exit's problems persist. On April 19, one of its patrons was arrested for harassing other patrons. It turned out that he was already facing charges for brutally beating an off-duty New York City police officer at a Jersey City karaoke bar in November. The cop was left paralyzed, according to the Daily News. Police said the arrested patron was strung out on Ecstasy, one of the drugs they had been able to buy so readily during their investigation.

Clubs like Exit that handle 10,000 patrons a weekend are bound to attract trouble, even when they are well run. They need sophisticated security, always a very limited, expensive commodity. Club owners recently asked the Bloomberg administration to allow them to hire off-duty cops, but were rebuffed. As former Tunnel and Limelight owner Peter Gatien once complainedto the New York Press, "The industry is singled out for a standard that no one can live up to. When you have an event at Madison Square Garden, you have 300 cops helping people. At nightclubs, they set roadblocks to ruin your business."

Yet the nightlife industry is crucial both to New York's image and its economy. A 1998 study by Audience Research & Analysis found that music and dance clubs contribute about $2.9 billion yearly to the city's economy, directly employing over 4,700 people. The number of clubgoers-24.3 million annually-exceeds the number of people going to Broadway acts, sports events, the Empire State Building, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art combined. Over a third of clubgoers are from outside New York, and 89 percent of them say that dancing or seeing a band was their main reason for coming to New York.

SMOKING BAN ADS FUEL

Because of the immense difficulties facing anyone trying to get a New York cabaret license, club sites often have multiple lives. Any site that comes with a cabaret license is disproportionately valuable. Thus Guernica, where bouncer Dana Blake was killed, is attempting a new life as a sedate, upscale club. But it is housed in the space that once held Save the Robots, a glamorous but infamous after-hours bar that didn't make it.

Guernica and the club scene in general had plenty of problems before Mayor Bloomberg's smoking ban. Now club and bar personnel are responsible for enforcing a smoking ban under the most trying of circumstances. Many of them don't really believe in it since the ban is causing them loads of trouble, costing them money in business and tips foregone. Income in bars has dropped by 20 percent since the ban went into effect on April 1, says the Economist.

Club owner David Rabin, president of New York Nightlife Association, toldCBS News that "We predicted all of it. We predicted worse, and I think worse is coming."

And now the ban has cost bouncer Dana Blake his life. The three siblings who were first charged with Dana Blake's murder toldpolice that their father was a famous gangster. He had directed a secretive cabal of businessmen involved in drug deals, gambling, extortions and contract killings in Chinatown. He cooperated with federal investigators after being indicted in 1995 for ordering three murders and conspiracy in a fourth. The Manhattan D.A. refused to prosecute the three siblings. One of their friends has since been arrested and charged.

RAPE KEEPS GOING UP

The city has averaged four reported rapes per day since January 1, about 9 percent more than last year. That's the bad news. But the city has also averaged four arrests per day, which is an increase over last year, although NYPD sex crimes chief Susan Morley has not specified by how much. Urged on by Morley and the NYPD, the City Council has submitted a resolution to the state legislature asking it to pass a bill extending or abolishing (Governor Pataki's preference) the 10-year statute of limitations on unsolved rape cases.

The NYPD says it has reviewed two-thirds of the 13,000 rape kits in its backlog, and has produced almost 1,000 DNA matches. Morley says they have matches back to the late 1980s-which will do no good unless the legislature extends the statute of limitations. Surely if ever an extension was needed it is this.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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