Community Board Blocks The Cock, Chance for a Bigger Cock Now in Hands of State Liquor Authority

Members of Community Board 3 tried to block The Cock from moving to the former Lit Lounge space at a meeting last night. But Allan Mannarelli, owner of the gay dive, is going forward with his plans despite outcry from neighbors.

“If they think I’m going to stand and get abused they have another thing coming,” Mannarelli had texted us before going before CB 3’s SLA committee.

He had every reason to expect a drubbing. In the audience was Dale Goodson, an activist neighbor and decades-long East Village resident who long fought against Superdive, where Mannarelli was a managing partner. Goodson made it his personal mission to shut down the “fratty” bar, repeatedly calling 311 for noise complaints and attending CB3 meetings. Mannarelli described him as the “#1 hater of Superdive.”

The bar, which closed in 2010, was repeatedly invoked during discussions of Mannarelli’s current operation, even as he reminded the board that for several years he owned and operated Drop Off Service, a neighboring bar that’s considered well-behaved.

Needless to say, Mannarelli is a seasoned vet when it comes to dealing with the SLA crew at Community Board 3, who have no qualms about busting balls. “I go through this dance with them all the time,” he explained after the meeting.

Mannarelli told the committee he was moving in part because in three years he’d be facing a buyout on his lease at 29 Second Avenue, at which point his landlord could tear down the building. “I find this location works perfectly for us,” he said of the slightly larger digs at 93 Second Avenue. “In terms of noise, we’re not going to have an issue with noise. The place is big enough where we can bring people inside, just like with the other place.”

Mannarelli’s lawyer backed him up. “We think it’s a good fit because the establishments are similar in nature. The stipulations at 29 Second Avenue are more stringent than those currently at Lit Lounge, my client would adhere to both.”

From the perspective of committee chair Alexandra Militano, dealing with Mannarelli was all about “strategy.” She and fellow committee member Lisa Kaplan feared that if they voted to recommend a denial of a new license in the Lit space, the board would risk losing their power to assign stringent “stips,” or stipulations, to the new location.

For those not familiar with CB3’s MO when it comes to dealings with bars and clubs, new and old alike, it might seem somewhat bewildering as to why allowing The Cock, a bar with no complaints or major issues in the past decade of its existence, to move just a few blocks would be such a big deal. In Mannarelli’s view, the neighbors would be gaining a well-behaved bar and losing what many of them described as a problem bar.

David Lohman, a neighbor who lives at the corner of East 5th Street and Second Avenue, described Lit Lounge as “horrendous.” He argued, “You ask any cop that was working in East Village at the time, there were all these offenses to the neighborhood, fights, you name it.”

To be fair, Lit did make efforts to clean up its act back in 2010. Nevertheless, residents argued their block has enough bars.

Stuart Zamsky of the East 5th Street Block Association said that when Allan Mannarelli first came to the organization “it seemed like an okay thing, one iconic dive bar replaces another one on the same avenue, but when you look at it a little closer, it doesn’t really work out.”

He added, “They did some soundproofing, but still the people who live near Lit Lounge suffer from that business and I don’t think they would suffer any less from a different dive bar.”

A resident named Carol, who had been handing out anti-Cock flyers, continued to invoke the current tenants as a nuisance. “The Lit Lounge was a blight to the neighborhood, thank god it’s gone, but to me The Cock is another recipe for disaster, it’s a residential neighborhood, and especially with an owner who has a bad reputation.”

One resident, Anne, recounted her usual Sunday morning stroll down Second Avenue where she turns up “gay porn” cards that read, “If you want gay action call this number” strewn all over the ground. “I can only assume they came from The Cock, maybe they didn’t but I think they did,” she said. Laughter followed.

Several residents cited a survey conducted by the East 5th Street Block Association indicating there are 61 liquor licenses within a 500 foot radius of 93 Second Avenue. One resident of over 30 years complained that the neighborhood has turned into “a bar-saturated community” with “its attendant noise and mayhem at all hours of the night.” She said she had to google The Cock in order to figure out what the bar’s deal was, and discovered that “among other unmentionable things it was referred to as ‘a dive.’”

But as one supporter of The Cock named John pointed out, “To say that there are 61 liquor licenses, but not all bars serve the same people […] I have to say that it is a unique place and that it’s only moving three blocks seems perfectly reasonable.”

As we saw with Lit Lounge and the outpouring of laments about the bar’s closing, The Cock has become a place with a defined community of patrons. Many of them showed up at the meeting to support Mannarelli and the bar.

Artist Xander Gaines, an advocate, pleaded with the board while tears streamed down his face and his voice quavered. “They asked me to go somewhere else to be myself, so I moved to New York and came to the East Village,” he recalled. Gaines admitted that he too hated “walking over vomit,” but reminded the crowd that his life didn’t end at midnight or 1 a.m. “There’s not a community that The Cock is for me,” he said.

One neighbor, Mr. Greenfield, called bullshit. “I’m sorry that The Cock may not happen on Second Avenue and Fifth Street, all I can say is that I can agree with everyone here who’s been against it. I wish you would think about putting in a bakery and look around at what we need in the neighborhood, which is not another bar,” he said. “I’m an artist myself.”

“I’m an artist too,” Xander interrupted.

“Ok, far out,” Greenfield replied.

Board member Andrew Chase said, “I think there is a public benefit in The Cock existing, I totally do, I’m totally sympathetic to that.” Even the chair submitted that “there is a strong case for public benefit.” Still, most board members were dubious.

“What is it, the rock n’ roll?” Allan pressed. “Is it the musicians?” He seemed to be referring to an white-topped, old-fashioned hatred for rock n’ roll hooligans. Militano responded forcefully, “No! It’s the crowds.”

The Cock ain’t no bakery, to be sure. Though hold up: their application did indicate they’d be selling “warm meat pies.” But the paperwork also confirmed the bar would follow in Lit’s footsteps as “a tavern with live music, DJs,” and would likewise “close at 4 a.m., all days.” In response, the board argued that the presence of live music at the 93 Second Avenue location was never approved, but Lit Lounge had gone through with it and organized scheduled live shows anyway.

“Lit Lounge, when it opened, never represented that it was going to have live music,” Militano argued. Furthermore, when the Avenue A location of The Cock opened, “Mr. Mannarelli can correct me, but he himself said that he understood that Avenue A being a mixed residential and commercial population was not the appropriate area for his venue, so he found the location of 29 Second Avenue.” She conceded that complaints at that location have been “minimal” but attributed that to the location of The Cock, which she described as “an area decidedly different in character.” (Among other things, an empty lot is across the street, though it won’t be empty for long.)

In a follow-up interview with B+B, Mannarelli argued: “They make this fallacy that there are no neighbors there and there are, like, five bars there now. I’m surrounded by a restaurant on either side. A lot of what they say is dated information, quite frankly.”

Militano continued to explain at the meeting that, in the past, The Cock misrepresented itself to the board, which came to find out there was a trust from which all the principals eventually “disappeared,” leaving only Mannarelli. “When they came to us originally it wasn’t [Mannarelli], it was a different guy, and he said, ‘I bought the name to The Cock and none of the principals are the same,'” she recounted, adding: “Superdive had its own misrepresentations.”

Alexandra summarized, “So we have three venues, one was Lit Lounge, where there were misrepresentations to this board, and we may have accommodated those businesses that may have grown and matured over time, but that had to be a learning process and a sort of adaptation process for residents as opposed to just the licenses themselves.”

Andrew Chase questioned Mannarelli as to what he was going to do to improve on the Lit Lounge’s operation. The Cock’s owner cited his commitment to increasing security levels: “That’s what it takes, spending money and making sure these things don’t happen.”

Mannarelli continued, “We’re bringing the entrance inside the space rather than having it built out onto the sidewalk, which I find personally problematic.”

He echoed to the board what he told us last week. “The point is that if we don’t buy this, it’s not like Lit’s going anywhere, that’s not a veiled threat, that’s the reality. They’re stuck there, they’re not moving, and the only way they’re gonna go somewhere is if someone buys them out. And if it’s not me, it’s gonna be someone else, quite frankly,” Mannarelli argued. “I’m moving forward regardless of what happens here. Because of the real estate market here, there’s nowhere else for us to go anymore, nowhere. It’s ridiculous, there’s nothing left.”

While The Cock and Lit Lounge may be “similar in nature,” they are not the same bar. Yet CB3 repeatedly cited their past dealings with Lit Lounge when it came to the case of The Cock. Mannarelli argued later on in a follow-up interview, “What they’re talking about is eight years ago when Lit was really, really crazy.”

At the board meeting, Mannarelli concluded: “I will prevail, and when I do get there you’ll realize that we are good neighbors, we’re not bad neighbors. We’re the kind of people that sweep the sidewalk at the end of the night.”

But the board seemed ultimately frustrated by their past dealings with Mannarelli, specifically. And while there were some push backs from within the committee (Lisa Kaplan pushed for a vote of approval based on the belief that the SLA would likely approve Allan’s application anyway) in the end, the board voted 4 to 3 to deny the application.

“I was only one off!” Allan exclaimed following the vote, which he’d originally guessed would be a 5 to 2 defeat.

We followed Mannarelli outside after the board had made its decision. “They didn’t provide me with any opportunity to make a deal, it’s just a ‘no,'” he said. “I fully expect them to behave this way, this is what they do. Why? I dunno.”

He added, “If we don’t sign the stipulations, it’s not like we’re going to misbehave. If I go to the SLA and they approve me, it’s not like I’m going to thumb my nose at them.”

But what’s next for The Cock? “I’m still gonna go talk to the SLA, and I still feel like I did from the beginning: why I can’t be licensed there when I can be licensed right down the block, doesn’t make any sense to me,” he explained. “What I don’t understand is that [the board] voted to keep the status quo, which they’ve been complaining about and, to me, it’s illogical.”