BAR RAZING

When the police call me at 2 a.m., I can often guess the script: A drunk has fallen through a storefront window.

A lot of people are coming out of West Side bars at 2 a.m., and some of them are falling through windows.

I’ve rented to bars.  That state liquor license — that’s gold.  It’s the mojo for a working-class guy trying to enter the middle class.  A bar can change its name and ownership, but it’ll always be a bar.

Unless it’s knocked down.

I razed a bar.  The Stop-N-Go. The city replaced it with a shopping center.  Was I against eminent domain?  No.  The Stop-N-Go was a hole, and we got paid a good price.  Our politically connected eminent-domain lawyer raised the bar on bar razing.

The only real loss, civically speaking, was  the city lost a bar with a secluded back-door entrance.  Patrons slinked behind a shoe warehouse to get to the bar’s rear door.  Nobody could see you go in the bar.  Mailmen in uniform especially liked that.

When I went in the Stop-N-Go, particularly on a sunny day, it’d be like entering a fun house; I’d trip and stumble. I couldn’t see anything except a couple lit cigarettes.  For guidance I tracked the owner’s voice, which usually said, “It’s dead around here, Stratton.”  That was the standard greeting, even when it wasn’t dead.  All commercial tenants like to say it’s dead.

A man at the bar was reading the Sporting News.

I heard a guy say, “Anything about softball in there?”

“Yeah, the Indians.  They hit the soft ball.”

We hired a mailman from the bar to do odd jobs at the building.  Like sweep the common-area hallway.  This building was formerly an office building, and some of the apartments above — converted from offices — were very asymmetrical: kitchens bigger than living rooms, bedrooms the size of foot lockers.  One tenant, who slept in a coffin, owned a heavy metal record store.  His coffin was in his living room.

Miss Sniadowska, another tenant, had a narrow foot path between mountains of brittle magazines and newspapers.  Ladies Home Journals and Cleveland Presses.  Volunteers from the city’s office on aging helped her groom the trail.

When my family sold that building, a lawyer made $12,000 in one minute.  Our lawyer phoned his friend, the mayor, and the mayor accepted our new price, which was $36,000 higher than our previous price.  The mayor — who was using developer’s money anyhow — was fine with that.  Our lawyer took his standard one-third cut: $12,000 — one-third of the $36,000 increase.

That developer — the guy knocking down our building — was a Jew who liked opera.  Just another Jewish music-loving landlord.  That’s a sizeable subset.  Another Cleveland Jewish developer is a violinist.  These guys need something more than burst steam pipes and triple-net leases to keep their sanity, I guess.  (Triple-net is when a store pays a portion of the building owner’s taxes, insurance, and maintenance expenses, in addition to the monthly rent,)

Even better for the landlord: when a storeowner pays a percentage of his cash receipts to the landlord.

We hit that jackpot once. We were renting to a Faflik shoestore.  Maybe it was called Faklik Store #688.   Fafliks were everywhere.

Faflik typically leased in shopping malls, where percentage leases are common, but we weren’t a shopping center; we were a 1920s Main Street building with no triple-net leases and, furthermore, a building that was about to be knocked down.  The Stop-N-Go bar was right next to Faflik.   And right next to Stop-N-Go was the Specialty Kitchen, owned by a Greek or Lebanese, depending on the year.  The gyro platter was the only constant.

Every three months, we’d get a check from Faflik/Wohl Shoe Co. of St. Louis.  It was free money.  A percentage of the store’s cash register sales.  Just a couple bucks but, still, it was like a gift.  It was like B.B. King getting a royalty check for a record he didn’t remember making.