More on "Save the Boom"

[EXPAT]

http://savetheboom.blogspot.com

 

As you can read in the attached blog the Save the Boom guys are looking to send an avalanche of postcards to the billionaire owner of the building to either donate it or sell it a reduced price to re-open the famous Boom Boom room in Laguna Beach.

[+ Lucky]

I have to admit that I don't understand this continued effort. Where were all these guys when the club needed the business so that it could get the revenue to hang on, or to move to another spot? Right now there is an election campaign underway for president that could change the future of this country. Many young gays would see better lives depending on how it turns out. The future of the country is at stake.

Instead we are asked to spend time saving a defunct bar in a town where gays no longer hold much say. When they say to pick your battles carefully, I think this is what they had in mind.

[EXPAT]

I couldn't agree with you more on priorities. However, the issues are certainly not mutually exclusive.

 

The issue wasn't so much about where were the gay men in supporting the bar - because it had a lot of support. The issue was the over- development of Laguna Beach into high end hotels / resorts. This billionaire bought the bar for an irrational amount of money to re-develop it and basically made a huge mistake because of the market plummet. So he has been unsuccessful in getting any renovations approved by the Laguna city council. He was renting it to the last management team of the Boom. But he wanted to go to a month to month lease with the managers of the boom and they couldn't manage that way and that was what closed the bar. So now he (the billionaire) is stuck. He has no revenue, no approved plans and his purchase price was so far out of line that no one would buy it from him at tht price. So the new appeal is to get him to basically write off the investment and give it back to the community. With real estate prices as they are, it is impossible to buy a new space and make any money on it as a gay / bar / restaurant at the current rates without drastically opening up the concept. So that is why the campaign is still progressing.

[+ Lucky]

It's possible that not being a drinker colors my feelings here. In Mexico a similar fight is being waged for different reasons. People like their bars!:

 

World Briefing | The Americas

Mexico: Shuttering of Oldest Bar Protested

 

By REUTERS

Published: January 30, 2008

Hundreds of former patrons protested the closing of Mexico’s oldest cantina, El Nivel, in Mexico City. The small bar, which received the first cantina license in 1855, closed on Jan. 2 after losing a 17-year legal battle against the owners of the building, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Demonstrators, many drinking beers, protested outside the bar’s padlocked door on a side street near the National Palace. They called for the university to renegotiate a deal with the bar owner or for the city to expropriate and reopen it. Mexican presidents from the 1870s to Ernesto Zedillo in the 1990s called in for a drink while in office, and when the exiled Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro lived in Mexico in the 1950s he frequented the bar with his fellow revolutionary Che Guevara. “I am 80 years old and I used to come here when I was 18,” said Ricardo Ruiz, a local artist. “What is happening here is what is happening to the whole city. They are destroying it, taking away the historic buildings,” he said.