Yongkang Road bars urged to close by 10 pm
The local government will force the bars on Yongkang Road to close at 10 pm to appease neighboring residents who have been complaining about the noise, an official from the neighborhood's subdistrict committee told the Global Times Tuesday.
The dispute between the bars and their upstairs neighbors came to a head Saturday night when a group of annoyed residents dumped water on some of the more than 200 bar patrons sitting outside.
A video of the incident, taken by one of the residents, showed patrons yelling up at the residents, who had just dumped the water from their balconies. "They gave us the middle finger and shouted at us," said Xu Yinhao, the resident who shot the video.
The dispute is further complicated because most of the neighboring residents are Chinese, while the bars' patrons are overwhelmingly expatriates.
The more than 20 bars on the street operate out of the storefronts of apartment buildings built in the 1920s. The walls in the old buildings don't do very much to keep out the noise, according to a local resident surnamed Gao.
The neighborhood's older residents find the noise especially disturbing, Xu said. "There are many seniors living here," he told the Global Times. "If they keep their windows open at night, it sounds like New Year's Eve out there, especially in the summer when the bars put out tables on the sidewalk."
One of the more popular bars, Revolution Cocktail, often remains open as late as 3 am on weekends, according to neighbors. "The bar has drink specials every Tuesday, so there are usually a lot of customers outside then. We can't do anything about this," one of the bartenders told a Global Times reporter posing as a customer. "We can only ask the customers inside to keep their voices down."
Residents have been complaining about the noise at night for at least a year. Last April, the bars made a deal with the residents that they would close at 10 pm, said Yang Zhihang, deputy director of the Tianping subdistrict committee, the government body that oversees the street. However, the bars clearly haven't lived up to the bargain.
Yang pledged to increase supervision over the area. The committee will ask the bars managed by an investment company to close punctually at 10 pm. If the company fails to comply, the local government will force it to change the type of business it operates out of the storefronts.
The roughly 30 businesses leased by individuals will be subjected to frequent spot checks. Those that close late may be fined, Yang said.
"We don't want all of the bars to move away," Xu said. "We just hope that the bar owners can stop using the sidewalks, take their tables back and keep their foreign customers inside."