Fire Inspector Prowls Hot Spots

The crowd outside Hollywood’s newest club, the White Lotus, was begging to be seen Friday night, begging to be let inside the GQ magazine party. About 100 of them crammed behind the velvet rope in an anxious, unorganized throng.

It’s the kind of scene that club owners desire: hipsters desperate to get inside an exclusive party. And it’s the kind of scene that Los Angeles Fire Inspector Robert Gladden sizes up for its potential hazards.

A publicity car was parked in front of the 12,000-square-foot venue on Cahuenga Boulevard, partly blocking the entrance, forcing the outsiders to crowd against each other. In the event of an evacuation, it could have been chaos at the main exit. The veteran inspector told the owners he wanted the entry cleared “or I’m calling the cavalry” to shut the place down.

With the city fire code as his bible and a keen eye for detail as his calling card, Gladden is one of 13 public assemblage inspectors for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

After 25 years on the job, he is both respected and feared among club owners, and he zips in and out of Hollywood’s most exclusive clubs like an A-list celebrity. When security personnel see him coming, they have been known to radio to their bosses: “Gladden is here!”

His territory includes 160 venues, including the popular Las Palmas and Nacional. With his no-nonsense, conscientious style, his job is to identify and order fixed any violations that could lead to the type of disasters that struck clubs in Chicago and West Warwick, R.I.

Gladden said the nearly 100 deaths in the Rhode Island fire, touched off by an indoor pyrotechnic display, and another 21 deaths in a stampede at an illegal Chicago club had strengthened his resolve to stringently enforce the city’s safety codes.

“As we’ve seen, it’s easy for something like that to happen when the rules are not followed,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to how aggressive we are that nothing has happened here. And also luck.”

Last year, the Fire Department closed nearly 50 nightclubs, resulting in 27 misdemeanor criminal charges for overcrowding. The department also brought 18 criminal charges against clubs for failing to keep exits clear and unlocked.

Gladden has the authority to shut down any club that poses an imminent danger to patrons. He is passionate about enforcement, in part because he knows firsthand the tragedy of death by fire. His father, a Los Angeles firefighter, died in the line of duty in a Pacific Palisades blaze. His mother also was killed in a fire that swept through her Baldwin Hills neighborhood.

During his shift that ended early Saturday, Gladden uncovered violations at seven of the nine nightclubs he visited. At one lounge, operators saw him coming and blew out unprotected table candles. In another, he made the owners secure precariously placed speakers. At one overcrowded club, he ordered the owners to clear out patrons. Exits at two other clubs were blocked.

In a sprawling city with 700 popular and diverse clubs, controlling crowds and spotting fire hazards is a tough job. But the 50-year-old Gladden has refined his strategy over the years.

He moves in and out of buildings at lightning speed, sometimes surprising club owners by entering through back doors or parking his car blocks away. He sizes up the scene: Are there enough exits, and do the exit signs work? Are doors blocked? Will the emergency lights go on if power is lost? Are the fire extinguishers working?

He needs only to point to a violation and owners respond. They speak fondly of him by day, but cringe at the sight of him by night.

“We have been blessed in Los Angeles to have the Fire Department that we have,” said Gene La Pietra, owner of Circus Disco and the Arena in Hollywood, clubs that impress Gladden in terms of compliance. “There are those who say some of the inspectors are very unforgiving, but it has saved our lives.”

Gladden’s stubbornness was on display as he surveyed the crowd outside the White Lotus. His job is to anticipate the dangerous what-ifs, and he detected the potential for panic at the entrance to the new club.

“Club owners like the crowd around the door because it gives it that feeling like you can’t get in, and that looks good to the people going by,” Gladden said. “What if something happens and they have to get out? What happens when they come out to this?”

For 45 minutes, Gladden argued with owners Chris Breed and Eric James, who did not have the keys to the display car he wanted out of the way.

“I want the door fixed,” Gladden demanded. As the inspector waited outside for a solution, Bruce Willis left through the back in a limo and Breed sneaked Tobey Maguire in through a side door.

“If you are a responsible business owner, you are concerned about people’s safety as well as if they are having a good time,” said Breed, who co-chairs the city’s nightclub advisory board for Hollywood. “Right now, this is a bit frustrating because he’s being a bit of an extremist.”

Breed and James gave up on finding the keys and instead made the impatient partygoers form a straight line.

“I don’t understand what the big deal is,” said 25-year-old Frank Banks, who claimed he was on “The List” and had been waiting for more than an hour. “What’s the difference between standing over here or over there? This is going to be the new thing, overreacting at nightclubs.”

The revival of Hollywood Boulevard over the last five years has brought on a nightclub renaissance, which typically keeps Gladden on a fast-paced schedule. He also checks bars, concert venues, restaurants, theaters and even the Hollywood Bowl.

Before reaching White Lotus on Friday night, Gladden visited Bliss on La Cienega Boulevard. He entered the elegant restaurant and lounge and noticed half a dozen votive candles on cocktail tables. Before he uttered a syllable, co-owner Chris Taggart blew them out.

“You’re celebrating a birthday?” Gladden said in a sarcastic tone, frustrated because he has previously told Taggart that the candles need to be enclosed in glass.

“These candles have been the bane of my existence,” Taggart said. “Every time I throw them out, somebody else brings them back.”

Gladden headed upstairs to the lounge, where he found a lampshade of balsa wood and papier-mache covering an exit sign. Taggart removed it. Next, Gladden found a patio door blocked. He pointed it out to Taggart and headed for his car. Taggart invited Gladden to return to the restaurant sometime.

Driving away, Gladden explained that he didn’t cite Bliss because the owner immediately fixed the problems.

A few minutes later, Gladden entered the Circus Disco, where La Pietra walked him through his 1,888-capacity cavernous space on gay Latino night. No problems were detected.

Gladden parked his car on Vine Street north of Hollywood Boulevard, and spent the rest of his shift traversing the heart of east Hollywood on foot.

He moved through the Palace, where 600 people danced and socialized, and spotted two large speakers stacked on other speakers. He ordered guards to move the speakers on top.

When he hit the club Deep at Hollywood and Vine, Gladden asked for a crowd count and then marched through to make his own estimate. When the number he was given didn’t jibe with the packed house he observed, he talked with owner Ivan Kane.

The next stop was the Cave, an adult club on Hollywood Boulevard. Gladden walked through the main room and out the back, where he was concerned about the rear exit being clear.

“That’s what I came to see, not the girls,” he said. “That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

A block west on Hollywood Boulevard, Gladden wanted to inspect CineSpace and Ivar, two of the town’s hot spots. At CineSpace, people were smoking illegally on the patio. Gladden had a word with co-owner Errol Roussel and exited through the back to surprise Ivar’s guards.

On the first floor of Ivar, a 14,000-square-foot dance club, a sea of hipsters were drinking and dancing to hip-hop. When Gladden surveyed the second floor, he was surprised to learn that it was closed. Although the crowd was not over capacity, Gladden deemed the club unsafe because everyone was jampacked in the same area.

“I don’t know why that second floor is closed off,” he said. “They’re looking at a big fat closure if they don’t open it.”

Seconds later, the deejay announced over his music: “The VIP is open, the VIP is open,” referring to the second floor. Anton Posniak, one of the owners, explained later that the second floor was closed because he didn’t expect to be so busy.

Next door at Star Shoes, owner Johnny Nixon faced a similar issue when Gladden found most of the crowd clustered around the deejay, leaving the front of the lounge nearly empty. By Gladden’s count, the club was over capacity by 15.

“We never shut down a place for 20 or less,” Gladden said. “I wouldn’t do that to them. My concern is just that some people are moved to the front so there isn’t that congestion in one area.”

At 1:30 a.m., it’s quitting time. Reflecting on the night’s events, Gladden had second thoughts about not issuing any citations, especially at the White Lotus.

He blamed himself for not stating on the permit for the display car that it could sit in front of the club for only one night -- Thursday -- when the club opened.

“So when I make a mistake, I admit it,” he said. “I go by the book, but I have to be conscientious. What upset me was that it was a quick fix, and they seemed overwhelmed and were not fixing it. They know the next time I come up in there, it will be with both guns blazing.”