Five Points: A Victim of its Own Success?

By Ron Aiken
MidlandsBiz.com News Editor
December 4, 2012

 

Forget the Five Points you knew.

Late-night weekends in Five Points now are something entirely different and have been for some time. The beloved shopping and entertainment district, for decades a haven for University of South Carolina merry-making, has been taken over in recent years on weekends by a crowd it never before has seen – legions of people who aren’t going into the clubs, aren’t there to obey the law and, worst of all for bar and restaurant owners, aren’t spending money.

Rather than a professional happy hour crowd followed by bars and clubs packed with college students blowing off steam after a long week of classes, Five Points on weekend nights has become a sea of diverse humanity packing every street corner, clogging traffic and teeming with elements never before present in such numbers. Driving by and judging from the enormous crowds at every intersection, one would think the bars and restaurants are doing a booming business.

Inside, they’re empty, says Merritt McHaffie, executive director of the Five Points Association. Everything now takes place on the streets outside rather than inside, and that alone is a safety concern. Rather than make sure people are of age and adhering to dress codes and have bouncers and bar staff on hand to control things, you have people out on the streets just hanging around, drinking, with no way to enforce drinking ages or dress codes or monitor behavior.

These are people with no intentions of going inside anywhere or spending money, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better if nothing changes.

Taking it to the Streets

Matt Shmanske has owned The Thirsty Parrot (formerly The Parthenon) in Five Points for the past five years. Prior to that he spent four-and-a-half years working at the former Rafters (now Sharky’s Too) before becoming an owner. He says he’s distraught by the drastic changes he’s seen in Five Points’ clientele over the past few years compared to what it was like a decade ago.

Compared to before, what you notice immediately are the outside crowds, says Shmanske, a 2003 USC graduate who also owns Burger Tavern 77 just up the hill on Devine Street. There’s two different crowds that patronize Five Points. There’s one crowd that doesn’t buy anything. They go down and use it as a hangout spot, a public park, for lack of a better term. These people, in my opinion, are the ones that are really causing the trouble. The other crowd are the people who want to go out, patronize places and have a good time.

We’re not seeing problems in bars, we’re seeing the problems on the streets, because there’s this huge group of people who can’t and won’t be allowed inside establishments, whether because of a dress code violation, or age or attitude. So it leads to a large group of people on the sidewalks.

The crowds, owners say, are driving away paying customers.

When large groups get together, that seems to threaten and intimidate people down there to have a good old-fashioned time and spend money, Shmanske says. It’s the group dynamics that scare a lot of people.

When I go out, I have a girl or guy friend with me. That’s it. I don’t have 75 people with me. It’s numbers thing. We all have seen a decline in business. We all talk about it openly and freely. Things are very much down from three years ago, four years ago-plus. A lot of the people who have been there from 10 to 15 years or longer, they’ve never seen the numbers so low. We’re talking about record lows for sales. In my experience, you’re only going to spend money when you feel comfortable, and if you don’t feel completely comfortable, you’re not going to spend as much money, if any. 

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See video below:  Merritt McHaffie, executive director of the Five Points Association  (Click here is the video does not appear)

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McHaffie says the effect of crowds on business is threefold.

One, people driving through at 11:30 or so see the huge crowds and think the places inside must be packed, so let’s go somewhere else, she says. Two, people may not find places to park and will go somewhere else. Three, people do come down, park and then find it hard to get through the crowds to get in, especially since some of the crowds can be intimidating. The crowd itself scares people away. The environment is not necessarily welcoming for people who just want to go have a beer and a nice time.

Scott Linaberry has been in Five Points even longer than Shmanske. He’s the former owner of Sharky’s, Sharky’s Too and Red Hot Tomatoes and owns the old Jake’s building (formerly Rockafellas). Because of declining business and concerns for safety, he sold the businesses earlier this year, though he still owns the real estate at each location.

I found I was spending the majority of my time trying to protect my investments rather than run my investments, says Linaberry, who has served on the Five Points Association board for the past 12 years, the previous two as chair, before stepping down earlier this year. I’ve been in Five Points working for the past 21 years, and while the bar clientele inside hasn’t changed a whole lot, the crowd on the streets has, and they’re keeping people out.

I’d say the peak years were between 1998 or so and 2004, 2005, Linaberry says. Profits fell about 25 percent from 2005 to 2009, and from 2009 until now they’re down 50 percent from what it used to be. Almost everybody I talk to wants out. Profits have been cut in half over the past six, seven years, and it’s no secret why.

Linaberry and McHaffie both agree on what started the drastic shift in the face of Five Points – the smoking ban adopted by Columbia and Richland County in 2008.

The ban put a lot of people on the streets who were in bars but who had to come outside to smoke, McHaffie says. At the time, there was no plan for that. No one really anticipated what that would actually look like. So your smokers are outside, and they may or may not bring their beer with them because people don’t know the rules or encroachment permits. So you let alcohol go outside, and suddenly with people, alcohol and smoking outside, there’s no reason to go back inside.

So then the non-smokers come out and a party atmosphere develops on the street. Then, underagers are there and their opportunity to drink has increased because they’re not having to go through door ID checks and have access to the beer people can bring out, and the party atmosphere continues.

Then, finally, you have your criminal element who preys on that. We have large groups of people coming into Five Points with no interest in buying anything or going inside anywhere or spending any money. It’s these people who deter the paying customers. It’s a new atmosphere in the last five years. People who have been coming here for 30 years have
never seen anything like this kind of atmosphere.

Linaberry agrees.

It’s not just a coincidence the problems started when the cigarette ban went into effect, Linaberry says. That put people on the street. That got this whole ball rolling out of anyone’s control.

Another factor magnifying the issue is that during the same time when the streets became where the action was, the demographics also changed, as more blacks began seeing Five Points as a destination and the area developed a large urban component lacking from years past.

What I noticed was about two or three years ago the city made an effort to close down a lot of the urban night clubs and bars downtown where they were having problems, Shmanske says. That left a lot of people with nowhere to go, and hey, here’s Five Points, with all these people outside, and it looks like it’s hopping.

My neighbor for a number of years, China Garden and Jungle Jim’s, that was primarily a mixed crowd, with a lot of students from Benedict and Allen University and non-students as well. That’s changed, now, too.

For McHaffie, the combination of those factors meant suddenly Five Points became a victim of its own popularity.

Somewhere along the line Five Points became the place to go in the entire Midlands, she says. We get groups of people here from as far away as Orangeburg, Sumter, all over the place who come here to party who never came here before.

Cameras, Crime and the Reality of Perception

The irony of an increasingly dangerous environment is that crime in Five Points is, without a doubt, down from previous years and is on a steady four-year decline according to records obtained from the City of Columbia police department. In every incident category except one – sexual assaults, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts from motor vehicles and other larcenies – 2012 numbers are down from 2009 cases, in some cases significantly. The only difference is in 2009 there were 22 incidents of motor vehicle theft, while in 2012 there have been 23 to date – an increase of one.

These facts don’t surprise Columbia police chief Randy Scott.

Right now the numbers are dramatically down for crime in Five Points, Scott says. What’s different is when we have an incident, it gets very publicized and people think it isn’t safe when it is. Five Points is a very safe place to be.

McHaffie credits Five Points’ aggressive network of security cameras as part of the reason crime figures haven’t skyrocketed along with the number of people in the entertainment village after hours.

Safety is a constant focus and has been for years now, she says. We have more than 100 cameras now in place; we’ve spent probably $100,000 on cameras in the past three years, a good bit of it through matching funds we’ve been able to get.

You would be amazed at what we’ve been able to catch and solve. The beating of the jogger everyone knows about, that young man thought he was beaten by six white males. That was his memory of it. It was only through having the incident caught on camera that the faces of the perpetrators were able to be seen, and from there we could go back and track their movements prior to the incident. If not for the cameras, the police might still have no idea who did it.

The results for catching criminals were immediate when we started with the cameras back in 2009 and have continued through today. It became readily apparent how valuable the cameras were. Since then it’s only grown in both the number of cameras and in our effectiveness to help law enforcement identify and catch criminals. We’re focused on the safety of our patrons and the security of our businesses.

McHaffie says the success of those high-profile cases, however, and having incidents now on places like YouTube for everyone to see has had a negative overall effect on the public perception of Five Points.

One by-product of having the cameras that hasn’t been positive is that people think because they’re able to see crime in Five Points that it has gone way up, when in fact it has gone down – it’s just more visible now.

Something can go viral overnight and skew the way people see Five Points. Crime has happened here and always will happen here, that’s a fact of life. The increased awareness of it, however, has created a misconception that hasn’t helped merchants.

Scott says the cameras have been instrumental in fighting the crime that has taken place and will continue to be.

The cameras – I can’t tell you how helpful they’ve been, he says. There are so many crimes we’ve been able to solve and cases we’ve been able to prosecute that without the cameras we simply never would have been able to. They’re a prime example of government and the private sector working together for public safety.

Still, though crime may be down and more criminals may be getting caught, that’s small comfort to business owners losing money every weekend with no end in sight. To them, while solving the occasional violent or property crime is great, the city isn’t doing nearly enough to combat the problem of overcrowded late-night streets that drive away business.

Lack of police involvement is the root of all the evil down here, Shmanske says. If we can get stricter enforcement of loitering rules and keep people moving along, I think you would see the group, the small percentage of people here that cause problems, go somewhere else.

And it doesn’t just affect our evening and late-night business. The perception of the crowds and that things are unsafe has changed things in other ways. There used to be a legitimate Happy Hour crowd from four to seven o’clock, a crowd of regulars and young professionals, Shandon locals, businesspeople, grad students, those folks have almost disappeared.

I used to open my doors at four, like a lot of people, but because of the bad publicity and fears of the crowds to come, they go other places and it’s hurt our business. So what you see is that a lot of the bars, almost all of them, won’t open at four anymore because they can’t afford to. People have adjusted their hours because they had to, and those people haven’t come back.

For Linaberry, the focus of the policing that does take place in Five Points allows not only for the current situation to proceed but actually get worse. He believes the city hasn’t adequately addressed the role of gangs in Five Points and fear it will take something drastic happening to affect meaningful change.

The police are no different than anyone else; they’re afraid of the crowds, too, so instead they go inside to harass the kids who are inside drinking trying to find underage drinking rather than dispersing aggressive crowds, Linaberry says. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel; there’s no threat to harassing college kids for IDs versus going out and facing the real issues, which is that we have gang activity here. We’ve had something like 50 rounds fired in Five Points over the past four years, and the fact that no one has been killed is miraculous.

One of the biggest problems we have with our policing here is that they’re reactive rather than proactive. The cameras are a prefect example. They’ve been so successful they almost think they don’t need officers down there because they’ll find the c
riminals after a crime has been committed.

It’s not the officers fault, it’s the tactics. When you have so many people and only 1 percent is there to victimize other people, you don’t know who the 1 percent is. That’s why we need better deterrents and tactics. There’s no better deterrent than an officer or a police car and having them involved, walking around. If I’m a gang member and I’m approached by an officer, I’m going to act differently than someone just out to have fun.

McHaffie and others say it’s difficult to know how much of the crime that does occur is gang-related.

We don’t know because the police won’t tell us, she says.

For his part, Scott is honest about its presence in Five Points.

I’m not going to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes and say there’s no gang activity in Five Points, Scott says. I have seen gang activity down there. But the reality is that there is gang activity everywhere; nowhere is immune from it.

And I can tell you that we have officers down there in an undercover capacity and that as soon as they identify is it is investigated. This isn’t something you see happen, but we take it seriously and we’re also very careful to do what is constitutionally proper. I’m not ashamed in the least to tell you how pleased and proud I am of the work all our officers do for keeping people in Five Points and all our city’s hospitality areas safe.

One thing everyone can agree on is that with the smoking ban firmly in place, the establishment of Five Points as a hot destination and no way to prevent the kind of peaceful loitering the village was designed originally to encourage, the issues faced by law enforcement, bar owners and patrons will only escalate.

I’m not expecting things to change, only increase, Scott says. We’re planning for it to increase and are acting accordingly. The university is growing, the amount of freshmen and other students are growing and the potential for violent crime there and everywhere is what gives me high blood pressure and keeps me up nights. We’re all in public safety together, and we’re dedicated to making our city, including Five Points, the safest it can possibly be.

For Linaberry, it’s going to take more than words to regain the confidence in the Five Points he once had.

Until the violent crime element is dealt with, until the city’s priorities in that regard are turned around, there’s no point in coming back, he says. It’s sad. Five Points isn’t what it used to be, and it’s a shame.

 

Ron Aiken is a freelance writer and editor based in Columbia, S.C. His award-winning journalism has appeared in newspapers, magazines, websites and books across the country.