I started asking around, and soon learned that the DNA Lounge was for sale. Over the years, I had seen a lot of great shows at the DNA. It's pretty much a perfect size for the sort of thing I had in mind (it's larger than a bar, and smaller than a theatre, a good mid-sized venue.) However, I hadn't seen any shows there in years: the owners seemed to have mostly given up on live shows (except for their regular friday night disco cover band...) It was also in a great location.

I made my first offer on the club in July 1998; there were several false starts, and it took quite a long time to reach an agreement with the current owners, but I finally entered escrow in April 1999. For those of you who have never bought a house, ``escrow'' basically means that the buyer and the seller have a contract to complete the sale, provided that certain conditions are met by both parties. By January 2000, all of the terms of escrow had been met except for the final one: my successfully negotiating transfer of the permits to operate the club into my name.

And there's the rub.

You might think that if one is buying an existing, operating business, and intends to continue to operate the same type of business at the same address, that getting permits transferred would be pretty much a no-brainer.

Sadly, it doesn't work that way: the buyer must apply for all-new permits, which may or may not be granted. (An explanation of what permits we're talking about is here.)

So, my business partner Barry Synoground and I spent months trying to understand the permit situation, and trying to find out the best way to get our permits. We talked to many different club owners to find out how they had done it. They had a number of different stories, all of which ended with, ``but whatever you do, don't do it the way we did it, because that was a nightmare. There must be a better way.''

For a long time, we thought that it would be possible to actually transfer the permits: apparently the way this had traditionally been done in the past was for the new owner to add their name to the old owner's permits, and keep the old owner on as a minority partner in the business for a few years. This didn't sound like a great idea to us, but it did sound easier than going through a full police hearing and public review. However, it appears that some time in the last five years (since the last time the DNA Lounge was sold) this loophole had been closed.

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In August 1999, we bit the bullet and turned in our applications for new permits. We introduced ourselves to the 11th street area neighborhood residents' association, and gave a presentation about our plans, and the various ways we planned to make the club be a good neighbor. That seemed to go pretty well. A few days later, we met with Captain Martel (the commanding officer of Southern Station, the SOMA district) and that also seemed to go fairly well. He said that he would rather that we didn't apply for after-hours permits, and sounded us out about what kind of compromises we would find acceptable.

A few weeks later, we got the official police recommendation: rather than the four conditions that the DNA's old permits had, these recommendations had fourteen conditions. Most of them were not objectionable: they were requirements about number of security staff and various neighbor-relations things, all of which were things that we were planning to do anyway. But, the kicker was the hours of operation: They planned to recommend that we be forced to close at 2:00 AM every day except friday and saturday, when we could be open until 3:30 AM with no new entries after 2:00 AM.

This was Southern Station's recommendation to the Police Permit Board. The actual conditions would be decided after our hearing.

For some reason I no longer remember, our hearing was delayed once or twice, and we didn't actually get to have it until late October, 1999. Basically what the hearing came down to was us trying to reach a compromise with the residents' association. The implication at the meeting seemed to be that if we could come up with a set of permit conditions that the residents' association would agree with, then the police would go along with that. Unfortunately, we didn't get to find out if that was actually the case, as we were unable to reach a compromise that was acceptable to both sides.

We asked that we be given a chance to prove ourselves: we believe that we can run a late-night club without disturbing the neighbors, and we are willing to make guarantees to that effect. We asked that we be granted the permits, and if we failed to live up to our promises, then it would be reasonable for them to further restrict our permits.

The residents kept making statements like ``it is not appropriate for these clubs to be open past 2:00 AM.''

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Since we didn't reach a resolution, we scheduled another hearing for a few weeks later. That hearing had pretty much the same result. A month later, in late November 1999, we got the official decision from the police. Our permits were ``conditionally granted,'' which is to say, permits for late-night operation were denied. The decision boiled down to:

• Sun-Thu: dancing stops at 1:45 AM, everyone out by 2:00 AM.
• Fri-Sat: everyone out by 4:00 AM, no new entry after 2:00 AM.
• 6 special events per year, until 6:00 AM.
  (Possibly with no new entry after 2:00 AM? This is not clear...)
• No in-and-outs: once someone leaves, they must pay full price again.

DNA's then-current permits allowed them to be open until 6:00 AM, 7 days a week. That's 28 hours of late-night operation per week.

This decision meant that they wanted to reduce our potential hours of late-night operation from the existing 28 hours per week to a mere 4 hours, plus an entry restriction that probably cut that in half anyway.

We decided to appeal this decision, naturally. We scheduled a hearing with the Board of Permit Appeals for February 2, 2000. Here is our letter to the Board of Permit Appeals.

(February? Yes, two months was the earliest we could schedule it. It should be becoming more clear to you why this process had taken more than a year alread: at every stage, multi-week delays were inserted. During our conversations with the bureaucracy, each round-trip took at least three weeks, sometimes longer. The process of conversation is that one makes a proposal or request, and then the bureaucracy has ``up to'' N weeks to respond. They never respond early. You get their reply, submit your rebuttal, and the process repeats. In no time, months go by.)

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On Feb 2, we had our hearing with the Board of Permit Appeals, and it went great! The room was at capacity, with about 200 of our supporters, and about 6 people in opposition. A representative of the police explained their position, then I made a speech, which you can read here; then members of the public spoke out on both sides of the issue. The official transcript of the meeting is on the Board of Appeals site.

A lot of interesting things were said, but the bottom line was, the commissioners voted unanimously (5-0) to overturn the police decision, and grant us after-hours permits with unrestricted hours of operation and entry!

I want to thank all the people who wrote letters, spoke on our behalf, or just came out. We couldn't have done it without you. This was an incredibly important victory for us, and for San Francisco night life.

That was only the beginning of the battle, however: before the police would grant us the permits, we were still required to comply with the current soundproofing regulations, which are far more stringent than the standard to which the previous owners of the DNA had been held.

This was a huge job: among other things, we had to replace the entire front wall of the building with 8" of concrete, and given how much work that was going to be, we found ourselves doing a major remodel of the club. Our original plan had been to do light remodel (move the bar, clean up the bathrooms, etc.), open quickly, and make more improvements as time went on. We originally had hoped to open just a few weeks after getting the result of the Board of Appeals. But because of the soundproofing requirements, we had to embark on a large construction project, and ended up being closed for more than a year.

However, we made a lot of great changes in that time, and finally re-opened our doors to the public on Friday the 13th of July, 2001! Details of the reconstructed club are on our remodeling page.

Stay tuned to the What's New page for continuing updates on the behind-the-scenes operations of the new DNA Lounge!