New All-Night Disco in Gaslamp Quarter Battles Shutdown

Last spring, Bruce Ingram, owner of Trax, a new disco in the Gaslamp Quarter, introduced a social attraction common to most major cities but new to San Diego--a four-hour dance starting at 2 a.m.

Ingram’s after-hours innovation was an instant sensation. Before 2, Trax’s clientele is young (minimum age for admission is 18, and no liquor is served) and predominantly gay. But with an infusion of revelers from the bars and nightclubs that close just when Trax is starting to rock, the makeup of the crowd changes. Gays and straights, teen-age punkers and fashionably attired yuppies dance side by side till the wee hours of the morning--if they have the luck and patience to get inside. On weekends, Trax regularly is packed to its capacity of 300 people after hours, and block-long lines outside the club are common, even at 4 a.m.

To Ingram, the vibrant scene represents not only a financial bonanza, but a fascinating social microcosm--a unique meeting of the wide range of minds and life styles in San Diego’s burgeoning urban center.

But city officials and police see a distinctly different picture at Trax. They quickly added the after-hours hot spot to the hit list of Gaslamp businesses--like card rooms and adult bookstores--that they say attract crime and other unsavory activities and the kind of people they have worked so hard to eliminate from the revitalized area. And they expressed the fear that problems would result in other city neighborhoods if other clubs were to begin promoting dancing after hours.

This morning, the City Council will consider an ordinance drafted by Councilman Ed Struiksma that would specifically require clubs with dance licenses to close from 2 to 6 a.m. The proposal already has the unanimous approval of the council Public Services and Safety Committee and is expected by Ingram and city officials alike to easily pass the council.

After Monday, Trax’s lights likely will go out and its dance party will be over at 2 a.m., at least for a time.

“Pending court cases, San Diego now will have the distinction of being the only major city in California that rolls up its sidewalks at 2 a.m.,” said Tom Homann, Ingram’s attorney, noting that San Francisco and Los Angeles allow after-hours dancing. “The whole situation seems very narrow-minded and small-town.”

Ingram has vowed to challenge the new law, setting the stage for a protracted legal battle over the right to dance until dawn in San Diego. And many of the dancers are ready to join the fray--more than 1,500 signatures on petitions opposing the proposal were gathered at Trax in less than a week and delivered to the council.

“I see the council meeting on Monday as a mere formality--there’s no way they will go against the police,” Ingram said. “But we’ll be back in business after hours. Even I was amazed by the response to after-hours dancing--I never imagined people who live outside the downtown area would line up for anything in the Gaslamp at 3 a.m., or that I would literally have to throw out big crowds of people at 6 a.m. Plus, when you look at other cities in the state, you see the law clearly is on our side. This ban never will hold up in court.”

Ingram won Round One of the legal battle. When it was discovered that the City of San Diego had long ago passed a law forbidding clubs with dance licenses to do business from 2 a.m. to 11 a.m., Trax was ordered to stop the late-night dances.

But Ingram filed a legal challenge to that ordinance, and in May, Superior Court Judge Mack Lovett issued a permanent injunction striking down the law, ruling that it was too vaguely written to be fairly enforced, particularly since dancing had commonly been allowed at bars citywide after 6 a.m., the legal starting time for serving liquor.

Homann based his challenge on a case in which the state Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a City of Los Angeles law requiring that adult movie arcades close at 2 a.m. “The precedent in that case was that there had to be some mechanism--a special permit process, if you will, regulating hours during which business can be done,” Homann said.

“The law being considered by the council Monday does not include that mechanism--it’s iron-clad. We have the same constitutional rights between 2 and 6 in the morning as we do during the rest of the day, and that includes the right to dance the night away, if we so choose.”

While Trax has been at the center of the controversy, the after-hours dancing craze has spread to Studio 9 on El Cajon Boulevard, Purple Rain on Adams Avenue, two other no-liquor clubs that admit teen-agers, and to Trax’s neighbor, the Gaslamp Disco. It’s a trend the Police Department’s vice squad wants to end--and one that could prompt a movement to shut down all of San Diego’s after-hours clubs.

Homann said owners of several Hillcrest neighborhood gay bars that remain open after 2 a.m. recently have been cited by police for allowing pool-playing after hours (clubs are required to shut down pool tables from 2 to 6 a.m., another longstanding city statute that had for years gone unnoticed and unenforced) and are considering legal actions against the city. Lt. Jim Sing of the San Diego police vice squad said he would like to see all bars and dance clubs close at 2 a.m. Although he said he could not cite any incidents of crime stemming from the after-hours dancing at Trax, Sing said, “Places that stay open after hours always generate a higher than average number of complaints.”

In San Francisco, Sing said, “Police have had big problems with every one of the 14 after-hours dance clubs. They cause tremendous problems.

“The patrons continue drinking after 2, either in their cars or by sneaking alcohol into the clubs. The neighborhoods where after-hours clubs are located always register a lot of complaints about noise, fights and drinking in the street after 2 a.m. There’s no doubt that we could reduce a danger to the community if we shut everything down from 2 to 6.”

Ingram counters Sing’s claim by saying many of his after-hours patrons sober up at Trax after having spent the evening drinking at establishments that serve alcohol. “During our first three months, we have been virtually incident-free,” he said. “If people are going to drink too much, I’d rather they be here dancing it off afterward than on the road driving home.

“And, besides, a major, cosmopolitan city like San Diego should offer this kind of entertainment if its downtown is going to be viable in the future. The demand for it is obvious--after-hours dancing has made Trax the place where the action is for people who never had a reason to be downtown in the past. What other business in the Gaslamp is able to attract 9,000 money-spending customers a month? I think we’re a positive addition to the area.”

The Gaslamp Quarter Council, a consortium of Gaslamp merchants that has moved aggressively to rid the district of adult bookstores and card rooms, has yet to take a stand on after-hours dancing. Judi Carroll, the council’s chairman, said Trax had not been open long enough for the group to form an opinion, adding that she was not aware of any complaints lodged against the club by neighboring Gaslamp businesses.

“We’ve worked very closely with the police on other issues, and generally we support their efforts to clean up the district,” she said. “But we also want to be more responsive to meeting the needs of the entire community of San Diego, and after-hours dancing seems like it might be a good thing in the Gaslamp area, as long as it doesn’t pose security problems. But at this point, we’ll wait and see what develops.”