Augustine’s. Cloud 9. O’Sheil’s. Gotham City. Boondoggle’s. The Raisin. The Cushy Lounge. Club Heaven. The Blue Elephant. Club Adrenalin.

The names may change, but the problems on Park Street stay the same.

“If I have my way, I’ll drive them out of town,” says Norm Marcoux, a resident of the Oak Park Apartments in downtown Lewiston, about neighboring nightclubs. Residents of the subsidized elderly housing complex have dealt with disturbances from various Park Street establishments for nearly 30 years.

Built on the site of a former department store, Oak Park houses 108 seniors and has a five-year waiting list for occupancy. Residents have a private underground parking garage beneath the building, or access to the public parking garage across Oak Street. The community of Oak Park is quite tight, but growing taut.

Marcoux, a stocky former store manager, has become the unofficial spokesman for the building in its bid to control the streetside behavior of patrons from the Blue Elephant and Club Adrenalin, two popular nightclubs that bookend the apartment block along Park Street.

Noise from the street, they say, is intolerable from 11 p.m to 2 a.m., when the two clubs draw, then release, their biggest crowds. Patrons walk by the windows of the first floor apartments, smoking and laughing and yelling, as they travel between the bars and public garage.

Residents on the Park Street side know all, and see all, of what happens on the street. They say they’ve watched people have sex on the hoods of parked cars, and caught a contact high from marijuana smoke wafting into their windows. It’s a five-night-a-week reality show outside, and they’re sick of it.

On Monday night, the Lewiston Planning Board will hold a public meeting on Park Street, stemming from the City Council’s request for recommendations on quieting the controversy. The meeting begins at 5:30 p.m in the council chambers in City Hall.

Over the past month, about 40 Oak Park residents have gathered for two no-holds-barred hearings of their own about the problem. Many – especially those on the first and second floors of the four-story building – fear retaliation from the crowds outside. Some, including Marcoux, said their cars have been vandalized or damaged.

Lewiston police have a liaison officer to Oak Park as part of a community action program: Officer Tom Murphy.

Most Oak Park residents feel the bars aren’t the problem, it’s the patrons. They speak about street-level shenanigans with disgust, and are filled with questions: “Why is it so difficult to move them?” “Why don’t they go home?” “Can’t they be told if they don’t behave?”

Frustration fills them: “They don’t care about us.” “Somebody has to be responsible for their behavior.” “We worked hard to live here, we are old now.” “We are closed in, like jail.”

“I’ve been here 27 years, and it’s been going on for 27 years,” one woman said during the gathering. “What makes us think it’s going to change, unless they change the law?”

City Councilor Lillian O’Brien, on behalf of Oak Park, has recommended rezoning Park Street to exclude bars and nightclubs; if enacted, the two existing clubs would become the last of their breed. The Blue Elephant and Club Adrenalin have been open on Park Street for less than a year.

“When they first came here, business was dead,” Officer Murphy told a gathering at Oak Park. “I told them, the more business they get, the more problems they’re going to have.”

“My job is to find a solution we all can live with, or deal with the problem.”

Shrieks in the night

“There’s no magic wand,” says Lewiston Police Chief Bill Welch about quieting Park Street. Welch can rattle off the names of the bars that have occupied the street for the past three decades, and says nearly every one of them has run into the same complaints as today.

Even O’Shiel’s, he said, a former police sergeant’s attempt at running a non-intrusive Irish pub, became embroiled. And in that case, the department was dealing with a bar owner that knew the Park Street situation intimately. Yet, the complaints followed, just like every other place.

Murphy says police are caught in an enforcement snarl. Their most effective tactic of crowd control – their voice – is the one thing they can’t use. Park Street’s like an open-air echo chamber, the tall buildings reverberating the street noise across downtown.

During a recent Friday, the first noise complaint on Park Street was reported at 12:45 a.m., about 20 minutes before closing time. Murphy and two other officers were minding the crowd, which the night prior had turned ugly. Three people had been arrested for disorderly conduct.

“We know we have crowds out there,” Murphy says. “Some things we don’t tolerate.”

On this Friday before Thanksgiving, however, the clubs were milder. The three officers stood on the Park Street sidewalk opposite Oak Park, and watched people meander next to the apartments, cringing at every unnecessary audible exclamation.

Skinny guys in flat-brimmed baseball caps and triple-XL striped polo shirts smoked and freestyled under the apartment windows. Groups of girls and guys loudly gabbed and swore; two guys exiting Club Adrenalin engaged in a fake altercation, just innocent, but noisy, horseplay. Private cell phone calls became impromptu public broadcasts.

A shrieking girl sitting in a parked car was warned once by Murphy, the polite officer handling her infraction with the tenderness of a grade-school hallway monitor. Two minutes later, she shrieks again.

Murphy rolls his eyes. “You see?” he asks, and strides over to shush her again.

Up above, lights flicker in some Oak Park windows. A few curtains ruffle. One elderly woman appears and sits on her window sill, watching the events below. Murphy and his colleagues stroll along next to the apartment, imploring silence, only to have their efforts defeated as soon as their backs are turned.

Murphy has a story about one night on Park Street.

He and another officer were policing the crowd there when a gun complaint was reported on Pine Street. As they attempted to respond, an inebriated man blocked their two cruisers. They told him to move, and he does.

But as the officers pass by him, Murphy says, “This guy gets right (back) out in the middle of the road, gives me the double-barreled number-one sign and screams ‘You blanking pig!’ What am I going to do? I can’t leave my partner on a gun call.”

It’s a funny story with a serious message. Quieting Park Street is only possible if the rest of the city is quiet as well, and even then, enforcement remains a problem.

“When I make an arrest, what happens,” he continues. “I put them in a car, and then I have to transport them out of there (leaving the area without a police presence).”

“The other problem is, what help will I be if I’m clearing a crowd and screaming, ‘Shaddup!'”

‘The city has double-whammied you’

The shadow of Oak Park looms large over the Blue Elephant, and not because the apartment block is across the street. An affable couple, Ajantha “AJ” Weerakkody and Aja Stevens-Bell, are the owners and frustrated operators of the night spot with a notorious history.

Weerakkody and Stevens-Bell opened the Blue Elephant after visiting the property on several occasions, they say, and consulting the city’s zoning and planning office. “We knew it was there,” says Weerakkody about Oak Park, adding he never dreamed it would be this big a problem. “This matter went from zero to sixty so fast,” he says.

Carmine Cartonio, the owner and operator of Club Adrenalin, says the same. “The fact is, it’s a commercially zoned area,” he says. “Why they have elderly housing there is beyond me. I told (Oak Park residents), the city has double-whammied you.”

Club Adrenalin opened in May. Cartonio says he invested $100,000 in transforming the club, and spoke at length with city officials about its location. “I knew all about it,” he says about Oak Park. “But everybody frowns on nightclubs. Wherever you go, nobody is going to like you.”

The controversy is hurting his business, Cartonio says, and he questions the city’s intentions. “Are they going to give me my $100,000 back?” he asks. “What does the city want to be? I’m trying to do something good for Lewiston.”

Four staffers, including Cartonio, comprise security at Club Adrenalin. Bouncers escort patrons to the parking garage, Cartonio claims, although some dispute it. Either way, he says, noise on the street is someone else’s problem.

“You can’t control people being loud,” he says. “Let’s be realistic. We need to stand back and ask what is realistic to ask of the clubs?”

Seven people work security during Blue Elephant evenings, all contractors from a private company. The bar has moved smoking to the rear of its building, inside a clandestine alleyway, to quiet street noise.

The Blue Elephant owners say they want positive relations with the apartments. “There are 90 people over there, and we’re a restaurant,” says Weerakkody. “I just want to make my investment back. We’ve thought about this over and over.”

“If they would just meet us halfway,” he adds. “I would meet them 75 percent, if they met us 25 percent. As long as they are willing to work with us, there’s always something we can do.”

Peace offerings

Cooperation is what Welch, the police chief, would like to see, since most other methods have proven ineffective. A frequently suggested option – the hiring of off-duty police officers to work in the bars – is a last resort, he says, because the department shouldn’t solicit extra business.

“We need to get them to work together,” Welch says.

Murphy, in speaking at Oak Park, had suggested a meeting between apartment residents and bar owners on neutral ground. On Nov. 28, a Planning Board workshop brought the sides together for the first time, as representatives from Oak Park, the Blue Elephant and Club Adrenalin shared a room.

David Hediger, the deputy city planner for Lewiston, said the Planning Board is leaning against treating Park Street as a land use or zoning issue. After the public meeting on Dec. 11, the board will deliberate and perhaps issue a recommendation to the council.

It could be a plan of action. It could be nothing. The board, says Hediger, has just been tasked with reviewing possibilities. Doing nothing – municipally – is a possibility. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he says.

A city punt, however, would inflame Oak Park, according to Marcoux. He’s sharply critical of the Planning Board, and says they’re not listening to resident sentiment. These are older people, he says. They can’t be constantly disturbed during the night. “I’m one of the younger ones,” he says.

Residents are tired of the graffiti, and the broken beer bottles in the parking garage. They’re tired of waking from a cacophony on the street. They’re tired of having their flower beds destroyed. They now fear their Christmas holly in the entranceway is next.

So after three decades, Oak Park is now taking a stand.

“They know who I am now,” said Marcoux plainly about the bar owners. “They’re responsible.”

Cartonio feels the issue is them or us.

“When it comes right down to it, somebody is going to have to move,” he says.

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