Is the embattled nightclub Slim’s seizing the chance to claim victim status? Are its irate neighbors mega-NIMBYs? Or do both sides’ claims not quite hold water?
By Joe Eskenazi
I flagged down the hipster with the too-tight jeans in the doorway of his apartment on Juniper Alley, a minuscule, quasi-industrial block a guitar pick’s toss from the nightclub Slim’s.
The rain was coming down at a rate somewhere between “torrential” and “head for the hills,” and when I asked the hipster if noise from Slim’s was a problem, he shook his head so rapidly the water whipped off his blond hair and into my eyes.
“No, no. It’s not a noisy block. It’s really not,” he says rapidly. “It’s just one couple who likes complaining.”
That until-now-anonymous couple was the subject of an engrossing article by Kim Chun in the Jan. 30 edition of the Guardian, which described them as, essentially, the NIMBY pair from hell, deluging Slim’s with noise complaints to the point that the venerable nightclub faces the possibility of a boarding up its windows and doors.
Well, Jodi and Kirby Watson take offense at that. “I think it’s very helpful for Slim’s to make this out as a witch hunt against them” Jodi Watson told me. "It’s not. It’s about us not being able to enjoy peace and quiet in our home whenever it’s loud."
The Watsons, incidentally, put their $859,000 condo on the market in November. Jodi Watson said the noise situation didn’t prompt that move; she landed a job in Seattle.
“If we were really set against [Slim’s] and trying to do deliberate and malicious harm, we’d be suing them for money,” she adds. “And we’re not asking for one cent.”
Instead, last month Slim’s owners and lawyer, Mark Rennie, and the Watsons and their lawyer, Stephen Williams, entered mediation. In a tentative “settlement,” the warring parties agreed to bring in acoustics expert Charles Salter to assess possible upgrades to further soundproof the club (upgrades that Slim’s, of course, will finance).
“We’ve set this procedure up to see if [Salter] can find a solution to this situation they find unbearable,” says Slim’s co-owner Dawn Holliday. She pauses and takes a deep breath.
“They’re the only people who find it unbearable.”
Holliday repeatedly emphasized to me that the Watsons are the sole complainers who ever quibble about her club’s decibel level. She estimated they’ve been ringing the cops several times a week for two years now.
Watson, not surprisingly, disagreed. She admitted to calling the police multiple times a week on several occasions, but she claimed “hundreds” of complaints have been made against Slim’s by other angry parties.
Well, I checked those numbers with Carol Bernard, the woman who handles statistics and records at San Francisco’s dispatch center. If anyone calls the police with a noise complaint against Slim's (or anywhere else), it ends up in Bernard's database. And you know whose claims are accurate? Nobody’s, apparently.
According to Bernard, from January of 2006 to Dec. 31, 2007, Slim’s received ...
In the latest saga of SF's "Craptacular, 3rd-World Elections," Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated the new voting machines this week that we could soon use at the polls. The machines perform very useful functions like actually counting paper and electronic votes, which takes it up a notch from our current machines. They can't even get certified by the state. The company who made those paper weights, Election Systems & Software, once refused to admit any wrongdoing, but has since rethought things and will be paying the city $3.5 million.-Andy Wright
