Shooting Renews Call for Closing Club

By Matt Dunning
POSTED JULY 10, 2008

Awakened at 3:30 a.m. by the sound of a heated argument below her window,  a Franklin Street resident first gave little thought to the commotion.

“I heard all this screaming...but I thought it was just some kind of scuffle,” said the 30-year-old fashion publicist, who asked not to be identified. “But then it kept going on, and it continued to get more and more escalated and violent, and just really nasty.”

Finally, after a half-hour, the woman rose from her living room couch to take a look. “Right when I was walking towards the window, the gunshots happened,” she recalled.

Five shots. First two, then a pause, then three more, she said. Within two minutes after she called 911, several police cruisers descended on the corner of Franklin Street and Broadway. The angry crowd, thought to have exited the club Pepper’s around the corner at Broadway and Leonard Street, had vanished, leaving police and neighbors behind to figure out what exactly had just happened.

It was the latest of several violent incidents tied to the club at 349 Broadway, and nearby residents are fed up.

In December 2007, police responded to a pair of reported shootings in the course of two weeks. Both shootings took place after 4 a.m., around the time the nightclub closes. Three months ago, a 22-year-old Brooklyn man was stabbed in the face outside the club. The victim received 18 stitches, but declined to cooperate with police.

The crowd apparently exited Pepper’s around 3 a.m. Residents said detectives told them the fight started over a pair of diamond-stud earrings, and ended when one man pulled a semi-automatic handgun and started haphazardly firing. One bullet pierced the window of Asia Rustic, a furniture store at 75 Franklin St.; another sailed through the glass at Station, a photo retouching business next door at 73 Franklin St.

The Franklin Street woman said police told her at least one person was injured in the shooting. She said they told her a man, allegedly connected to the incident, was found at a Brooklyn hospital later that morning with a gunshot wound to his right hand. Police officials would not confirm the cause of the fight or the reported injury.

Deborah Schwartz, who has lived on Franklin Street since 1980, said the combination of Pepper’s Lounge and the Knitting Factory on Leonard Street has turned what was once a quiet residential neighborhood into a late-night cacophony of, at best, drunken roughhousing and, at worst, violent conflict. 

“I don’t like it,” Schwartz said. “I used to walk down the street at night and feel comfortable. I do not do that now.”

If neighbors of the club want to see Pepper’s shut down, they aren’t alone. During the July 9 meeting of Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee, an outraged committee chairwoman Carole DeSaram blamed the State Liquor Authority (SLA) and New York City police allowing the violent incidents connected with the nightclub to pile up, despite receiving a number of complaints from CB1 and neighborhood residents.

“It’s a disgrace to the city of New York,” DeSaram said. “They have to get their heads together on this. They’re not doing enough.”

“I lay this at the SLA’s doorstep,” she added, “and if one person is killed on this, I assure you they will have the biggest civil suit they have ever known on their hands.”

CB1 members said they plan to write a letter to the building’s owners urging them not to renew the nightclub’s lease, as well as another communication to the SLA asking it to revoke or at least suspend the club’s liquor license.

“It’s a menace to the community,” CB1 member Peter Braus said. “It’s not something that this community wants around any more.”

Last year, CB1 members recommended that the state deny the club’s request to transfer its liquor license to a new management group, setting off a chain of events that, so far, has seen the club fined twice and placed under suspicion of mail fraud, but has held onto its license.

After the board voted down the club’s request to transfer the license to another entity, club owners sent an application to renew—not transfer—their license to the SLA in October. As proof that they had contacted the community board, they attached the postal receipt, but it was for the transfer, not the renewal. The SLA hadn’t heard any objection from CB1 to a license renewal (because CB1 only knew about the transfer request), so the renewal was granted.

“We have a lot of literature on that establishment,” SLA spokesman Bill Crowly said. “The transfer application is still pending with us, and we’re still looking into that.”

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