Taking Back Midtown

The creeping Disneyfication of Manhattan has just been handed a setback: A Manhattan Supreme Court justice ruled that an expanded ban on nudie bars violates the First Amendment. Nurse Bloomberg will, of course, be dipping into the city's shrinking coffers to fight this attempt to stop the grand transition from Fun City to Bland City.

Comments

[joe]

Couldn't you have found a more misleading, juvenile, assinine publication to link to? I think I was almost able to figure out the judge's holding from this article.

Doesn't the removal of the 60/40 rule mean that the presense of any adult materials make the business an adult business? 7-11, watch out.

But it is funny that nudie bars have higher protection from zoning than coffee shops. Some clever libertoid is going to argue that the buying and selling in his Quik-e-Mart is expressive behavior, expressing his Capitalist beliefs.

[asmile]

Nudie bars do not have higher protection from zoning than coffee shops. "Adult" businesses in New York City must comply will all zoning regulations that restrict areas to commercial, industrial, residential and mixed use zones. With the specific intent of driving these businesses out of the city, the Giuliani administration refused to allow those businesses in commercial zones, restricting them generally to areas zoned for light commercial use. The regulations included the definition of an adult business as one that devoted 40% or more of its space to "adult" products. (The definition of adult products is sometimes quite amusing; it includes, for example, the photographic depiction of a "disernibly turgid" male member, either covered or uncovered.)

Adult businesses are not arguing that, on First Amendment grounds, they should be allowed to exist in neighborhoods where other commercial establishments are not allowed. In the case at hand, they aren't even arguing that they should be allowed to exist in neighborhoods where other commercial businesses ARE allowed. (They tried that argument in suits against the original zoning restrictions, and failed.) What the businesses argued was that the city had said was: here's what an adult business is. If you are an adult business, you cannot operate in any neighborhood zoned for commercial use. What many of the adult businesses did, instead of just closing, was to find ways to continue operating by changing their product mix and physical layout so they did not meet the city's definition of an adult business. (Some of them spent considerable amounts of money to do this, and some did it in ways calculated to pique the ire of the bluenoses behind the regulations; one adult booksstore changed its name to "60/40 video."

The city's reaction was to create a much more restrictive definition of "adult business," and, yes, the removal of the 60/40 rule could easily have led a store that sold Playboy and Penthouse to be ruled as adult businesses unless they sold them in a section of the store physically removed from other merchandise. In fact, any bookstore would have a hard time deciding what books they'd have to consign to such sections, which by the zoning regulations would have to be walled off so they were not visible from the rest of the store. And the city officials who'd be charged with determining which books, videos, DVDs and other media qualified as adult material--building inspectors.

[Rhywun]

I agree the new Disney-fied Times Square is rather creepy, and annoyingly choked with tourists.... BUT is it really any worse than the filthy, crime-ridden eyesore of years past? I don't think so. Lots of people in New York bemoan the loss of that seventies "feel" in the city - I guess the one where there was a potential mugging around every corner... yeah, that must have been exciting. I find that hipster attitude to be rather disgusting. If your idea of a "fun" city is a dirty, bankrupt, dysfunctional mess - well, there's always Los Angeles.... (Just kidding....)

[joe]

"Nudie bars do not have higher protection from zoning than coffee shops."

Untrue! NYC could arrange its zoning to forbid the serving of coffee, and the Supreme Court would likely uphold the law, since serving coffee is not Constitutionally protected. Nude dancing, on the other hand, is considered protected speech, and the city must allow it to occur somewhere - hence this lawsuit.