Ex-Night Spot May Reopen as Bureaucratic Hot Spot
Diego’s Surfside Nightclub, once the hard-partying bane of peace and quiet in Solana Beach, may soon be packing them in again. It might reopen as a new club, of sorts, with a new clientele, all under a different name. City Hall.
If negotiations go according to plan, the Solana Beach City Council and administrative staff will be the next tenants in the expansive, salmon-colored stucco discotheque and restaurant on Old Highway 101.
When the club shut down five months ago, council members were, perhaps, the least likely people you would expect to see at Diego’s--unless they were complaining or calling the cops, according to both club managers and council members.
The thought of the staid, five-member council conducting its business amid the same strobe lights and booming sound system that once animated the North County hip haunt boggles minds in this city of 13,000, many of whom are retirees.
“Back then,” Mayor Celine Olson said, “when we were getting complaints about noise, drunken brawls and drug abuse, that club would have been the last place I would have considered for a City Hall.”
The news brought a bitter response from the management of Diego’s Inc., which still operates a club and cafe in Pacific Beach.
“They’re going to put their City Hall there, eh?” said Dan Stango, Diego’s director of operations. “That’s a slap in the face. They attacked us ferociously, made sure we didn’t survive, and now they’re taking over the building. . . . Even in a little town like Solana Beach, how hard you work and how well you do in business isn’t what counts. It’s about who you know in politics and whose hand you grease.”
Diego’s management has blamed the council and area residents for undermining the business’ short-lived success, which lasted about a year after its fall of 1986 opening, Stango said. Patrons from North County’s suburban communities flocked to Diego’s, with its slick, citified ambience. It was meant to be an alternative to its laid-back but lucrative neighbor, the Belly Up Tavern.
At the time, Solana Beach was an unincorporated community, subject to the County Board of Supervisors’ vision for development. Despite protests by residents, the county approved construction of a glitzy beachfront scene--a concept grafted from the original Club Diego’s in Pacific Beach, Olson said.
The Solana Beach transplant lived up to its reputation for raucous patronage and late-night noise, Olson said. And area residents struck back.
“People were so disgusted when the county approved the club’s permit,” Olson said, “the drive to incorporate as a city got a lot of support. The city of Solana Beach owes a lot to Diego’s.”
But gratitude was not the sentiment that led the newly formed City Council to bind Diego’s business with restrictions on music and noise, to call for a police crackdown on drunk and disorderly conduct, and to impose a barrage of requirements--more parking, mandatory free valet service (to reduce tire-screeching and engine-racing in the parking lot) and beefed-up security, even on slow nights.
The financial drain proved to be too heavy, owner Ray Tontini said. Just as the city voted to suspend Diego’s conditional-use permit, Tontini filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Tontini said the sentiment was clear: Solana Beach didn’t want what he had to offer.
But, he adds, there is another level of irony to the city’s overture to take over the club.
Sale of the building to the city will relieve some of the debt burden that Diego’s Surfside incurred during five years of business. Tontini estimates his loss at $1.8 million.
“If they want to make a City Hall out of it,” Tontini said, “it’s fine with me.
“It’s impossible to do business there. Whether that’s right or not, I don’t want to say anything that will discourage the city. I want them to buy it.”
The next step the City Council must take is to compare the cost of its current lease at the Lomas Santa Fe Corporate Center and the cost of buying and converting the nightclub building. At Lomas Santa Fe, 8,000 square feet of offices cost the city about $150,000 a year. There has been no discussion on a price for the 13,000-square-foot Diego’s building, which Mayor Olson said has an architectural bearing that is “reminiscent of a mausoleum.”
Work on “softening the facade” and revamping the interior is required, Olson said, which means adjusting rakishly hung mirrors, converting the dance floor into council chambers and removing the imposing, glass-block beverage bar. Some features will remain, such as the sound system and lighting.
With the prospect of Diego’s being tamed for city administrative use, manager Stango lamented what he felt has been a pointed attack on his company.
“For the neighbors to incorporate themselves in order to move out our viable business was the most un-American thing I know of,” he said.
Councilman Richard Hendlin, who is scheduled to present the council Tuesday with a report on the City Hall plan, termed it differently: “Poetic justice.”
