Cruel Summer

On the first weekend in August, the listless late-night air in Westport finally exploded.

Movement is always the first sign of trouble, and it started around 2:30 Sunday morning when a few cops, standing around on Westport Road between Mill Street and Pennsylvania, heard a message on their radios and took off toward America’s Pub to break up a shouting match involving revelers, police and private Westport security guards. One guy — sweating, his eyes watery — got too close to one of the Westport guards, and the burly man shoved him to the ground. Cops cuffed some of the adult partygoers and led them away. A few bystanders traded angry words with the cops, but the momentum died out and the crowd relaxed.

Still, tension begets tension. Moments later, a black woman passed under the barricades that cops use to control weekend crowds on Westport Road. Within seconds, she had either fallen or been tackled and was on the ground struggling fiercely with two cops, a woman and a man, who hauled her to her feet and pinned her arms high in the air. The yelling woman’s high-heeled shoes came off as the officers carried her away.

That’s all it took. Cops were agitated, and people were pissed. Somebody stepped too close to the barricade, so an officer squeezed off a blast of pepper spray; people in the crowd gasped and started running. By 2:45, Westport was chaos, the crowds dashing for cover, the trigger-happy officers shooting pepper spray until clouds of the stuff hung in the air. One officer simply walked down the barricade line with his pepper spray, in a black cannister the size of a small fire extinguisher, hitting everyone he saw.

A girl sat on the ground crying as friends poured water over her face to try to ease the sting.

The crowd surged with uncertainty. Two couples, the women wearing lavender bridesmaid dresses, huddled at the corner of Westport and Mill. Others let loose a barrage of empty beer bottles at the cops, who quickly grouped with their riot helmets in the parking lot next to Buzzard Beach.

On other Saturday nights, this would have been about the time that officers started pushing the mostly black crowd down Mill Street and out of Westport. On August 3 they thought better of it and stood by motionless in the lot. More bottles rained down on them, hitting one cop in the elbow. Another bottle crashed near a throng of people, but no one was hurt.

The police helicopter, usually an irritating but distant presence in the weekend sky over Westport, flew low and loud, its searchlight angrily staring down departing revelers.

“They just started macing us ’cause they were mad at us,” said one man, who asked to be identified as Bounce. “They’re just assholes. They sprayed me for no reason.”

By 3:10, the crowd was gone. The cops broke their ranks in the parking lot, took off their helmets and began the business of putting away the barricades or having a smoke. At 3:15, about a dozen Kevlar-vested SWAT officers arrived and swept through the deserted streets. One was armed with a shotgun, the rest with long nightsticks. All wore grim faces.

Afterward, Major Marcus Harris of the Kansas City Police Department said he wasn’t sure what caused the brawl. “Just things that happen in a big crowd. I don’t really know. Nobody knows what happened.”

The fracas, says Lieutenant Kevin Ewing of Westport Public Safety, was the “worst it’s been this summer.”
Compared with last summer, crowds in Westport have been smaller for much of the season. Police and merchants say that’s because in the spring, city leaders loudly announced that kids under eighteen — who have traditionally helped clog the streets of the entertainment district after-hours — would be ticketed if they stayed out past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays and past 11 p.m. the rest of the week. Curfew violations in Westport this summer have been negligible, says Major Jan Zimmerman, who oversees the police there.

Last summer, 46 police officers were siphoned from the hundred or so on regular Saturday-night duty throughout the city, but this summer Westport has required only 24. As many as ten armed private-security officers (the same number as last year), hired by the Westport Merchants Association and commissioned by the state, have continued to augment the police. This month, however, the total crowds have grown to about the same level as last August — around 8,000 people Zimmerman estimates.

For most of this summer, the action in Westport has been sedate: Outside the Broadway Café, people in their twenties play chess on the sidewalk, sitting on red milk crates and smoking cigarettes. Vendors sell pizza and brats and Wundadogs. One night a bachelorette party lugged around an inflatable penis. A dwarf in a stroller lumbered by on Mill Street, past the steady crowd of quiet black teens sitting atop the concrete walls of an adjacent parking lot. On the balcony of Buzzard Beach, a woman made loud exhortations to the guys strolling in the alley below. “I’m touching my nipples in public! I’m pointing to my nipples in public!”

By 2:30, most Saturday nights grind to their usual denouement. A dozen white cops appear at the intersection of Westport and Pennsylvania and begin moving the black crowds out of the area. There is no outright hostility, just both sides’ simmering irritation with this routine: the cops, impatient, mock-tough, trying to move the crowds out as swiftly as possible; the crowds, lingering, chatting with friends, resentful of being rushed home. Flashlights shine in the faces of stragglers.

“Start walking! Let’s go!” a cop bellows. “Come on! Let’s go!” a guy retorts in hoarse imitation.

As people move down the street, officers shift the barricades to close off the sidewalks. By 2:45, Westport Road is empty. That leaves Mill Street, where low-riders and souped-up cars — with undercarriage lights blazing green and purple, massive speakers pouring out mad watts of hip-hop power and porn movies playing from television screens — hold court until well past 3 a.m.

One night, 28-year-old Steve Johnson watched the cops slowly move the crowd south off of Mill Street. “If it was all white folks, they wouldn’t do this shit,” he said. “We ain’t no more or less trouble. The only trouble is when people say you can’t do this.”

Last summer, Zimmerman told The Kansas City Star that officers made almost 400 arrests, more than 30 every Saturday night, from early June to early September. Two of the people arrested for carrying concealed weapons were wearing bulletproof vests. Late July and August are usually when tensions burst.

At the end of last July, the Westport Merchants Association lobbied City Hall to turn over Westport’s public streets to private control, which essentially would have created a gated community in the heart of one of Kansas City’s most public spaces. The city council rejected this move, but the proposal brought Westport’s Saturday-night crowd problem to City Hall.

In August 2001, councilwoman Mary Williams-Neal led a fact-finding expedition to the scene, where she and some other council members tried to figure out what young people really wanted to do. That led to no small measure of grandstanding. During a council meeting on October 4, city officials recognized that there weren’t enough activities for young people. Kids surveyed by Williams-Neal had suggested gospel concerts, bowling, a coffee house, movies, teen clubs, skating, poetry readings and comedy clubs.

“We have to encourage the private sector to come in and work with us as a partner,” said Colleen Low of the Neighborhood and Services Department. “First and foremost, youth have to be involved. If we’re going to have successful programs, we need to know what it is that they’d like to participate in.”

Council members weighed in on Westport that day, too.

Becky Nace: “We have to provide what [failed private teen clubs] provide, and that is something every Friday and Saturday night, not just once a month, not just in the summer, not just for a fall dance, every Friday and Saturday night with music, with adult supervision, with some appropriate guidelines … that are enforceable in the right venue. The solution is very simple: Provide what these inappropriate venues are providing. [And] put them in a safe place … out of adult-entertainment districts.”

Alvin Brooks: “The problem’s not going to be solved just by talking about it. It’s not going to be solved by us just going down to Westport and Mill or Pennsylvania on a Friday and Saturday night and looking at crowds. It’s going to be solved when we, as political leaders, and our young people come together to make it happen.”

Terry Riley: “This is something that we have to do as a city.”

A year has passed. The city’s best answer to a Saturday-night problem? Sunday-night bowling! On Sunday nights at the AMF Loma Vista Lanes at 87th and Blue Ridge Boulevard — a long way from Westport — the alley is dimmed, and the pins are bathed in black light that makes them look like rows of teeth waiting to be knocked out. Hip-hop pounds. But throughout June, only a handful of kids handed over $2 to bowl the night away. The ten security guards looked silly patrolling a nearly empty bowling alley, so they mostly lounged on chairs in the parking lot. For a few weeks, the twenty adult supervisors outnumbered the kids, some of whom worked at the alley. It was like going to a party when none of the cool kids had come.

The kids didn’t seem to mind. Ryan Harvey, a 21-year-old who recently graduated from military school and plans to attend Penn Valley this fall, understood that city officials “want us to be somewhere.” But he said, “When we go there, they try to move us somewhere else. If there was more stuff for people to do, there’d be less trouble.”

Technically, though, city leaders haven’t expressed much interest in providing activities for guys like Ryan, who are adults by all definitions. The festivities at Loma Vista Lanes are geared toward people from 17 to 21; they’re part of Summer in the City, a rec program for all teenagers. For two years now, the program’s manager, Pam Sloane of the Parks and Recreation Department, and her crew have staffed Sunday-night bowling for the 17-and-older crowd. But in the early days of Summer in the City, there were even more activities for this set.

Former Mayor Emanuel Cleaver created Summer in the City’s predecessor in the mid-’90s, as a response to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and a fear that gang violence would sweep through Kansas City from the West Coast. He called the program Hot Summer Nights and funded it with money from parking tickets. Back then, City Hall seemed to care a lot more about providing activities for older teens.

Brenda Andrews, now the city’s youth advocate, ran Hot Summer Nights from 1994 to 1999. She remembers hosting Friday- and Saturday-night dances for teenagers inside the gym at Penn Valley Community College and at Hogan High School on 63rd Street near Troost. For Andrews’ most successful dance nights, she rented the American Sports Center on the south side of town. It had batting cages, basketball courts and a two-level gym she could pack with 400 teenagers. Kids came from as far away as Topeka and Oak Grove, and she turned away 300 kids every weekend.

“We made it hot and we let them design it, and we had the hottest DJs,” Andrews recalls. “When we started out, kids would fight over the silliest things. We had three or four fights a night. But by the last year of it, two fights all summer. The kids started policing themselves.”

In 2000, though, everything changed. Bob Mohart, who was head of City Hall’s Neighborhood and Community Services Department (he died in May), and Terry Dopson, head of the Parks and Recreation Department, decided to shift Hot Summer Nights and its $425,000 budget from Neighborhood and Community Services to Parks and Recreation. “[Bob’s] whole thing was, if there were recreational activities being performed, they would be better suited utilizing the parks-and-rec facilities,” says Les Washington, acting director of Neighborhood and Community Services. “At the time, we were trying to get parks and rec to utilize their facilities.”

Dopson and Mohart believed the city could save money by using city rec centers instead of leasing private spaces around town. But they also changed the name to Summer in the City and geared the activities to younger teens, ages thirteen to sixteen. Sloane, who at the time was just about to take over the program, says the logic in trying to attract a younger crowd was to alleviate “fights breaking out, police concerns about things, things that were going on in the parking lot that shouldn’t be.”

Mark Bowland, the superintendent of recreation for parks and rec, explains, “We felt [older teens] could be more responsible and independent in choosing their own recreational experiences.” Which, by the way, thousands have: They go to Westport.

Kelvin Simmons, who was a 5th District councilman at the time (now chairman of the Missouri Public Service Commission), carped about the changes in city programs at a council meeting in May 2000. “We have a continuing problem in the Westport area because our youth have nowhere to go,” Simmons said. “And when that problem arises, the youth get blamed for those kinds of problems. With this particular program, I have been informed that we are no longer catering to the older teenage range of these youth. And then we have to say, ‘What are they to do? Where do they go now?'”

Two years later, a few of them are going to the Loma Vista Lanes.

Though Andrews and Bonnie Mims, who oversees bowling nights for the city’s Summer in the City program, insist that they never had any problems with older kids, stereotypes linger. In mid-July, when forty or so kids were showing up, one of the bowling alley’s Sunday-night security guards speculated that eventually word would get out and that people who cruise Prospect for entertainment would come on down. “You pull Prospect in, you’d need a metal detector and a task force,” joked nineteen-year-old Alexis Wright, a business major at UMKC. “And I’m talking industrial size, not those little wands.”

“My thing is, you have to give a person a chance,” says Mims. “I’d like to see Prospect come.”

By August, between sixty and eighty kids were checking out the bowling scene. It wasn’t scary; in fact, the kids seemed to be having a lot of fun. But the teens still had to follow City Hall’s less-than-cool rules, which four girls found out one night when Mims told them they couldn’t bring their cell phones inside — a longstanding rule at city facilities, intended to keep kids from calling for backup if there’s a fight.

“Oh no, we can’t come up here with no cell phones,” one of the girls protested. Mims talked to them as they headed back to their car, and a few minutes later they ditched their phones and came inside. But they didn’t stay long.

Inside, Mims and a half dozen teens would occasionally break into a KC Slide, dancing in a line of bowling shoes, sneakers, socks and sandals. Staffers acted like friendly big brothers and sisters. But despite more advertising, including radio spots on KPRS 103.3, this year’s crowd is only one-third the size of last summer’s. Mims says the advertising wasn’t well-thought-out. “I’ve had parents call and complain, not knowing we were open this year.”

“The city doesn’t have the same commitment,” says Carla Carradine, who helps Mims oversee the bowling. This year, the parks board more than halved Summer in the City’s budget from $500,000 to $200,000. Bowland says they had no choice — the city council mandated that all departments cut their budgets.

“I can’t tell you how much the city pays on recreation, but it’s enough in my opinion,” says Williams-Neal, the councilwoman who took City Hall to Westport last summer to find out what kids wanted. “If you saw the budget and saw the thousand things we have to do, I don’t see how we can do anything right,” she says.

Eventually, Carradine thinks that Summer in the City will be axed.

That might be a shame for eighty of the city’s young bowlers. But this summer is over anyway — it ended August 11.

There’s still a larger question about the city’s logic. If leaders want kids to do something besides hang out in Westport, why did they schedule bowling on Sunday night?

“Sunday was the only night we could get,” Mims says. Besides, when it comes to city staffers, she says, “our lives are booked.”

It’s 10 o’clock on a Thursday night. At the Hillcrest Community Center just south of Bannister Mall, men ages 19 to 25 are playing city-sponsored Night Hoops. Bodies bang in the paint, people dive on the floor for loose basketballs.

The first game is a mismatch. One team, in yellow, puts on a one-sided show of stuffs and steals, fast breaks, easy layups and a few spectacular alley-oops and dunks by number 31 who, in the purple shorts, is lean and deadly as a knife. The crowd of thirty cheers at each fabulous play. At halftime the score is 43-18.

David Jones’ squad played the team in the black jerseys — the ones getting whupped — a few weeks ago and lost by five. The team in yellow looks unbeatable. Jones, 23, has been playing Night Hoops since 1994, when he was in high school. “I think the program is really good,” he says. “A lot of inner-city guys get to have something to do.” He says he recognizes guys now who played in high school almost a decade ago. “I’ve seen the cat in the purple,” he says. “The guy in blue used to play for Southeast.”

Jones is coming off of a broken ankle — his day job is quarterback for the Kansas City Jazz, a semipro football team. He just wanted to put together a decent team and have some fun this summer, and he’s point guard for his team. “I do what I do best,” he jokes. “I pass.” He surveys the yellow team with a competitive eye. “There’s a team better than that out there.”

Steven Pace, 22, sits nearby and shares Jones’ view. He says it’s not that the team in yellow is so good but that the team in black is just not trying at all. “A hustling team will beat you anytime.” But as the second half gets under way and the team in yellow builds on its lead, it looks as if Pace and Jones may be kidding themselves a bit.

That doesn’t really matter, though, because everyone is having a good time tonight. A little later, Pace and his pal Rich Byrd, seventeen, watch Jones’ team take the floor with just five guys — no reserves, no coach. They play valiantly and, in the second half, keep their game tight. Unlike the first game, this one has a great swaying, back-and-forth feel — multiple turnovers and changes of momentum don’t come off as sloppy play but rather as gutsy competition. In the end, though, Jones’ opponents just lay too much ball on his team.

Pace has played in Night Hoops since he was in high school, too. He says the program has kept him out of trouble. “If I didn’t have a game, I’d probably be sitting around somewhere drinking,” says the Penn Valley business major.

When the city started Night Hoops in 1992 to keep older kids off the streets, fewer than sixty guys showed up. But the venerable program has grown and become a success, attracting boys and girls — starting at age ten — as well as men and women as old as 25. The different age groups and genders get their own venues. (Men play at Hillcrest, boys at Central High and girls and women at Penn Valley Community College.)

Night Hoops has always been more than basketball — the players have to take classes in subjects such as “life skills development,” first aid, CPR or starting a business. They don’t necessarily like the classes, but they attend because they want to play.

Last year, close to 1,200 players registered; this year, almost 1,100 people showed up, half of them over age sixteen. “We do try and get more people out,” Bowland says. “The more people come out, the more people will not congregate at places like Westport.”

And yet, according to a parks and rec staff member, only sixteen teams played at Hillcrest on Thursdays and Saturdays, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. At most, that gives 200 people something to do on Saturday nights. Spirited games with middle-school and high-school boys draw close to 100 people to Central High — during the week. And fewer than twenty girls and women played games at Penn Valley. Here’s the kicker: Night Hoops officially ended on July 31.

All of which is making no dent in the crowds at Westport. Which is too bad, because the guys at Hillcrest are enthusiastic about being able to play hoops instead of having nothing to do.

This past spring, Philip Olson, a UMKC sociologist hired by the Kauffman Foundation to study Night Hoops, urged the city council’s Finance and Audit Committee to expand it. “The number of youth that are served is only a fraction of the number it could serve, and the amount of money that’s being put into the program, at least at last year’s level, was minimal.”

The Night Hoops budget had grown over the years, from $25,000 to a peak of $250,000, but this year’s budget is only $147,000, another victim of citywide budget cuts.

Though city leaders pay lip service to entertaining the masses, Kansas City is littered with failed private clubs for teens. The rule is this: If you open it, they will come, and they will keep coming until something gets out of hand and the city closes you down, or you just decide that the headache isn’t worth it.

Take Bill “Dusty” Rhodes, who’s spent fifteen years running security at clubs around town. Last year he thought he could make a go of a club for teens, so he opened Da Joint, at Sni-A-Bar and Blue Ridge Cut-off. He’d been open about three months, hosting nearly 400 teens on Fridays and Saturdays. But last fall, on September 8, three kids were killed at a nearby convenience store after they left his club. Rhodes and his men had cleared Da Joint by 1:35 a.m.; at 1:55 he heard the shots a few blocks away. He ran over and saw fifteen or twenty kids, all from his club, hanging out.

The cops descended on the scene, and later the media and neighborhood associations painted Rhodes’ club as a menace, even though police records indicate that they’d never been called there. The city’s Regulated Industries Division did not renew Rhodes’ dance-hall license at the end of that month, and Da Joint was history. “They were looking for a scapegoat,” he says.

He hopes to submit an application for a dance hall license for a new spot on East Bannister Road. If he gets a permit, he says he’ll have security guards patrol places that kids might go after his club closes at night. “I wish I had taken that extra step and gone there and stopped those kids from getting shot,” he says. “It weighed on me real heavy.”

Marc Coyazo and Robert McDaniel thought they could help by starting Cozmo’s Bar and Grill ten months ago in an old restaurant in Lee’s Summit. By midsummer, between thirty and forty kids were coming from all over to kick it in the club, which, with its abundance of smooth wool decor, looked a bit like a ski lodge. Revolving lights washed over the dance floor, which was suitably smoky, but overall the club felt well-lighted and wholesome, as if the kids were out at a friend’s house. “Can I use the phone?” one girl asked McDaniel, so she could call for a ride home.

“You know where it’s at,” he replied with a nod.

Kids tried to act cool, but they were just fronting — they looked to be having fun. As music from Nas and Braveheart’s “Oochie Wally” blared inside, fifteen-year-old Natasha McGrew said she had come because it gives her “something to do on Friday nights.” She says, “It’s good music my mom would never let me listen to.”

The skating rinks are boring, she said, and they play crappy music like Britney Spears. Skateland down the road in Grandview is a case in point: It closes promptly at 11 p.m., when parents pull up to get their kids. A neat spot, if you’re fourteen.

“This place is pretty cool,” said Ryan Harvey, the Loma Vista bowler who had also discovered Cozmo’s. Where he goes is based on simple criteria: who’s there, what’s the music and where’s the opposite sex. “Most of my cool-for-real boys go here,” Harvey said.

“There’s not really too much to do,” added a guy who said his name was Joe Smith. He said he just wanted “a little party spot to be hoppin’ with the hoes.”

The kids told Coyazo that if he advertised more, the place would be packed, but Coyazo wore the rueful expression of an exhausted parent. “One of the reasons a lot of the under-21 clubs don’t make it are kids,” he said. “There’s constant baby-sitting.”

What Coyazo didn’t tell his customers was that Cozmo’s wouldn’t be around much longer. Because they can’t sell liquor, under-21 venues need hundreds of kids — not a few dozen — to pay cover charges and buy sodas. “We’re not making any money,” Coyazo said.

He and McDaniel closed their club the last week in July.

Even when businessmen do make money, they sometimes don’t have the stomach for it. John Haynes owns the Troostwood Banquet Hall at 6049 Troost. It’s a sweet spot — room for 300 on the main level and another 300 downstairs. At the start of the summer, parents came to him looking for a place to host parties for their kids who were graduating high school. It was, Haynes says, “an isolated three or four events.” But each time he rented out the hall, the parties got bigger. Word got around, and what were supposed to be parties for small groups of friends turned into blowouts for 200 or 300 people.

“Someone else made those plans without my knowing about it,” Haynes says. “They kind of took it upon themselves to advertise that they were going to do it every week.”

In early July, the throngs became especially unruly. “They put it out that there’s a party here tonight, and every kid in Kansas City shows up,” Haynes said at the time. The police had to disperse those kids who hung around outside, loitering on Troost, disrupting traffic, littering, throwing things at passing cars.

Neighborhood associations such as the Southtown Council and the 6049 Coalition complained and threatened to take action against him. Haynes reconsidered. His hall was meant for wedding receptions and retirement parties. “I’m not interested in having my facility noted for teenagers,” he says. One day, Haynes took a phone call that sent him over the edge.

“How much to rent your hall?” a young man asked him.

“What are you planning?” Haynes responded.

“I’m going to turn sixteen,” the caller announced, and as he explained that he needed a place to throw a big party, Haynes decided there was no way.

“I do not do youth events from this day forward,” he declared. From then on, Troostwood was strictly for ages 25 and up. Haynes had welcomed teens because he knew they didn’t have a lot of places to go. “When you come to your place and you can’t even get to your facility, then what’s going on down there?”

Rhodes, of Da Joint, knows the answer. He admits that he doesn’t want 1,000 kids in one building. But, he says, “what they need is these places all over the city.”

In the spring, Westport merchants thought about asking the city to raise the curfew age from 18 to 21. More recently, they kicked around trying to support liquor licenses for curbside vendors, which would have made it easier for cops to shoo away people under 21. Ultimately, though, they opted not to pursue this idea.

Early this year, one committee of community leaders and members of the Westport Merchants Association discussed raising Westport’s curfew age from 18 to 21; the idea went all the way to the city attorney’s office, where Galen Beaufort drafted an ordinance that would have made it illegal for voting, eligible-for-the-draft citizens to congregate in Westport [“Covert Curfew,” May 16]. At the time, Donovan Mouton, Mayor Kay Barnes’ neighborhood advocate, told the Pitch that the draft ordinance merely provided “a framework for discussion. It’s nothing nefarious intended.” And no law was ever passed.

Meanwhile, another committee of city leaders hoped to persuade bar owners throughout the city to reserve one weeknight for young adults to come in and hear some music, grab a bite or have a soft drink. “The suggestion was that we approach club owners about their slow nights, which we surmised were early in the week — Tuesday, Wednesday,” Assistant City Manager Anita Maltbia told the Pitch in May. “They would not be able to sell alcohol, but they could serve nonalcoholic beverages and food.”

City staffers imagined that the bars would be open for the eighteen-to-twenty set from 7 p.m. to midnight or 1 a.m. It’s “a market-based approach,” Mouton said. As young adults flocked to the soft-drink nights, other bars around town would see there was money to be made and would want a piece of the action. Vendors such as Coca-Cola would beat down the doors to be sponsors. “If this works, we have to look at advertisers who will pinpoint teenagers: clothing, food, soft drinks,” said Michael Carter, who is president of the Carter Broadcasting Group, which owns radio stations KPRS 103.3, KPRT 1590 and KCKN 1340, and who served on one of the Westport committees.

All that hot air went absolutely nowhere. Carter confirms that no bars ever signed on.

“We thought we were being creative by [trying to bring on] outside entrepreneurs,” the parks department’s Bowland says. But, he adds, all of the entrepreneurs contacted wanted the city to provide startup money. “We want them to do it, but they want the city to put the money up for them to do it.”

Maybe Bowland should have called Romeo Ryonell.

The music promoter, whose real name is Ryonell Frederick, began operating a teen night in the banquet room of the Sunset Inn, 7901 East 40 Highway, at the end of last year. He says he helped develop Hot Summer Nights when Cleaver started the program. Because he operates from the hotel, he didn’t need to pursue a license with the city. He went way in the hole in the beginning, but he says he’s starting to climb out.

“Every time you get a place where teens form up, the city wants to boot them out,” he says. “The younger folks are really easy to deal with. A lot easier than the media makes it.”

City council members might want to think about that. At last fall’s council meeting, Terry Riley offered an optimistic platitude. After all, he said, giving kids better things to do “was something that we have to do as a city.” Now, his comments to the Pitch sound defeatist. “I was very interested in working with the issue. The mayor appointed some other people. I have not been intimately involved in participating in this. I’m still receiving complaints from both bar owners and residents, young teens and young adults. What is it gonna take? I wish I knew.”

Reminded of her comments last fall — “We have to provide what [failed private teen clubs] provide” — Councilwoman Nace says, “I don’t think we’ve done that well.” She adds that “we” is not just City Hall but the community. She suggests that the Parks and Recreation Department convene a task force to explore how college towns handle their nightlife. “I think it’s an avenue no one has pursued,” she says, and besides, parks and rec leaders “have never known what to do.”

For a while this summer, kids were hanging at the Catfish Cabin Complex, a converted grocery store at 35th and Prospect. Life at the Cabin was pretty smooth, even with hundreds of kids — and adults — showing up on the weekends. The only rough spot came early in the summer, when a sixteen-year-old fired a round from a sawed-off shotgun, threw the gun into the crowd and took off running. Ten cops descended on the Cabin, caught the kid and arrested him.

But the Cabin never had a dance-hall license and has since closed. Which is just as well. “I don’t think a lot of people want to go to a place called Catfish Cabin,” Harvey said one night at Cozmo’s. At Loma Vista a few nights later, Alexis Wright frowned at the mention of the place. The Cabin, she said, was a “dirty place.”

And her final analysis might just as easily apply to the entire city: “You come out smelling like fish.”