Smoke-Free Bar Has Clean Air, $1 Beer

You can drink, dance and listen to a disc jockey’s music at the Basix nightclub, but if you want to light a cigarette you have to go outside.

“It’s an enlightenment for customers who suddenly realize they don’t have to put up with cigarette smoke--there is an alternative,” said Bill Watkins, who opened the nightclub Oct. 31 in partnership with Pittsburgh Steelers’ football player Chuck Lanza.

“When you walk through the door, just take a breath and you can smell the difference,” said Watkins, who has asthma.

Outside, a billboard reads: “Try smoke-free air for a change. Draft beer $1.”

The owners say they have had no major problem with the policy.

“Every once in a while you get somebody in here who isn’t aware of the policy, and they’ll light a cigarette. And everyone will turn and look at them. It’s just like they totally ostracize them. You don’t have to say a word,” Watkins said. “When they’re told it’s smoke-free, they put it out very graciously. And that’s the end of it.”

(Smoking is prohibited in at least one other bar in the United States, the Jazz Showcase in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel.)

On Fridays and Saturdays, the South Bend club has about 500 customers, each paying a $3 cover charge, the owners say.

Watkins said there was much doubt that a no-smoking bar would succeed.

“No one believed it, literally. We were fought from day one,” he said.

He cited tobacco industry statistics, saying only 22% of Americans smoke.

“I think this country is ready for a smokeless kind of living environment,” Lanza said.