On the last Saturday of October last year, Ybor City closed down.
You wouldn’t have believed that if you were one of the estimated 20,000 revelers who clogged Seventh Avenue for Guavaween, the annual bacchanal that takes place on the Saturday night before (and occasionally on) Halloween.
But for all of the bedlam taking place on Seventh, most of those partygoers were content to purchase cans of beer or other alcoholic drinks sold by liquor stores on the street, or pre-purchased and stuffed inside their own backpacks. The street is wet-zoned for Guavaween, meaning open containers are legal inside the boundaries of a fence that surrounds the entertainment district.
But if you were to ask many of the merchants who look forward to making money on Saturday nights, they’d tell you that despite the huge crowds, Guavaween is a loser — not only for their bottom lines, but for the community as a whole.
The Ybor City Chamber of Commerce owns the name of Guavaween and considers the event a prime fundraiser. The merchants’ message to Chamber President Tom Keating is simple: Mr. Keating, tear down that fence!
On March 15 they’re taking that message to a higher power.
Some of Guavaween’s biggest critics — Ybor property and business owners like Alan Kahana, Jack Shiver, Don Barco, and Richard Boom — created the Ybor Merchants Association late last year. Barco, the owner of King Corona Cigars, said they set up the 501(c) 3 because of the feeling there was a “void” in the community to speak up for merchants. The nascent organization is slated to go before Tampa City Council on the 15th to ask that the city no longer grant a permit to the Ybor Chamber for the temporary fence.
David Sunday is the chef and owner of Sunday’s Fine Dining, a restaurant located on the eastern side of Ybor that, due to positive word of mouth, has been doing solid financial business over the past half year. But Sunday says he can’t afford another Guavaween — a night when the crowd gets its drink on outside his establishment and never dares walk inside it.
On a normal Saturday night Sunday says he brings in $3,500. Last Guavaween? About $94, or 97 percent less.
Jerry Dufrain, owner of the Orpheum nightclub next door to Sunday’s, says he made nothing that night. Zero. “By the end of the day I paid my staff, I paid for the cost of opening the business, and I had less than that in my register.” He contends the only people who make any money on this night are parking lot attendants, who can commandeer up to $20 a car in some lots.
John Doble of the Tampa Bay Brewing Company, speaking at a Ybor City Development Corporation board meeting last week, said, “Guavaween is a total disaster. Everyone who has a business here, we lose 75 percent of our normal sales.” He complained that delivery of grains for the beer they brew on site is blocked by Guavaween fencing.
Tom DeGeorge, the owner of the Crowbar nightclub off of 17th Street, flatly calls it a “a real shitty event.”
This has been the mantra of businesses and local residents for several years now. They complain not just about the wet zoning but about the $17 price of admission ($12 if purchased in advance). Coupled with parking costs, the ticket outlay puts patrons in the hole before they even make it to Seventh Avenue, and as a result they have less incentive to spend their precious disposable income.
Two years ago, after a particularly disappointing Guavaween, approximately 60 angry Ybor merchants and residents gathered at the Marti-Maceo club on the far west end of the district to lob complaints. Those complaints were fueled by some business owners’ claims that Ybor Chamber has stiff-armed them regarding their concerns about Guavaween. More recently, David Sunday says that Keating told him he was having “some issues” with Richard Boom, the owner of A Dirty Shame and Sunday’s neighbor down the street on East Seventh, about getting rid of the fence. According to Sunday, Keating said, “If Richard doesn’t like it, we’ll put the fence up right in front of his doors and he won’t do any business.” Sunday said he immediately told Boom about the comment.
When asked about that remark, Keating said there must have been a breakdown in communications. He did recall talking to Sunday about the fence, but denies any ill intention, saying it’s not part of who he is.
As president of the Ybor Chamber, Tom Keating’s raison’d’être is to boost the entire Ybor community. He’s proud of the number of events that the chamber now presents each year with the same seven-member staff he inherited when he took over in 2005. After 16 years of having a production company, C.C. Events, promote Guavaween, the chamber opened up the event to competition last year. But after failing to come to terms with the three companies who bid, the chamber opted to take on the responsibility of producing the event itself, risking its own resources. He said the event made a profit of approximately $26,000.
Afterwards, Keating said he and his staff were burned out. So he was “chagrined” that merchants like Barco were blasting him in early November to call again for the removal of the fence (some businesses, like the Columbia and J.J.’s Café, did sell some food at the event).
When asked if he and his board were amenable to tearing down the fence and eliminating the wet zoning, Keating was noncommittal last week. “I would like a little more time,” he said. “My board will act as quickly as they feel comfortable with,” adding that there were “significant issues” regarding security and insurance for the event that the bar and club owners might be unaware of. After meeting with the Merchants Association this past Monday, he said that removing the fence was “a direction I think we can go in.”
Merchants Association members emphasize that they hope whatever issues that exist between them and the chamber can easily be resolved. They’re hoping to work with the Chamber on an alternative than can enhance Guavaween, not replace it, and are looking at various options.
One such model is based loosely on something like WMNF’s “Tropical Heatwave,” in which ticketholders are given wristbands that provide access to participating nightclubs. Others talk about a whole week of events, à la South by Southwest in Austin.
Richard Boom, who believes Guavaween has gotten an unsavory reputation over the past few years (thanks in part to the fence), is excited about the new possibilities.
So is Paul Wilborn, one of the people who helped create Guavaween back in the mid 1980s. Now executive director of The Palladium Theatre in St. Pete, he says that in the early days there were “no beer trucks or Hooters floats.” He wasn’t particularly happy when the wet-zoning and the fencing came in. So he likes the idea of a new direction, one more in keeping with what the district has done to reinvent itself over the past five years, including the advent of the GaYbor Coalition as a catalyst.
And it’s not just GaYbor which is changing the conversation. There’s been a renaissance along the eastern branch of Seventh Avenue, and there’s more and more talk of the entire area taking better advantage of its status as a cultural tourism destination.
The changes on the east end were spurred to some extent by the elimination of what some merchants called a cancer in the ’hood — Club Empire, which closed its doors in early November exactly a month after the October 2 killing of 20-year-old Leslie Jones Jr. in the club’s VIP room.
City Councilmembers demanded that the city’s legal staff find a way to shut Empire down. Then capitalism worked its magic when attendance plummeted 90 percent in the immediate weeks after the violence.
Now, in comparison to 2011, Sunday’s business is up 340 percent from a year ago, says its owner. His new neighbor across the street is Barbarella, a club that features soul music on Thursdays, indie rock on Fridays and ’80s alternative on Saturday in the building that formerly housed Frankie’s Patio. Jerry Dufrain’s move of Orpheum from the far west side of Ybor next to Sunday’s doubled the club’s size and allowed for what he calls “medium level shows” to come to Ybor instead of the State Theatre in St. Petersburg.
Last year Ybor City received a $2.5 million historic preservation grant from the County Commission for Centro Asturiano, the Cuban Club and the Italian Club, followed by a $2 million Historic Preservation Challenge Grant Program to promote heritage tourism and historic preservation. With that funding opportunity in mind, La Gaceta editor and publisher Patrick Manteiga is calling for Ybor to market itself as a hub for “cultural tourism” as cities like Savannah, Charleston, and St. Augustine have. In making his pitch to the YCDC, he said the city must change its zoning laws to allow for bed-and-breakfasts, a crucial part of such destinations.
Last week the Ybor City Museum hosted a tour of historic buildings that attracted over 200 attendees. Chantel Ruilova Hevia, president and CEO of the museum, hailed the event as a success because it drew a lot of younger people, some of whom she said don’t typically come into the district.
As CL went to press, King Corona Cigars’ Don Barco said he was “jolly as punch,” believing now that Ybor Chamber of Commerce officials were leaning toward removing the fence. Will Guavaween evolve along with Ybor, the district it has both promoted and divided? We’ll know for certain when the parties come before the Tampa City Council on March 15.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2012.