“Essentially it’s like a Friday or Saturday night, at a bar in Bushwick, there’s a few people dancing and people drinking cocktails, other than that it seems like a very standard night,” recalls John Barclay, one of the co-founders of the Bossa Nova Civic Club, along with the newer Paragon. “Out of nowhere, there’s about a dozen agents from different city and state agencies that raid the place all at once,” he remembers.
That was life under MARCH, the Multi Agency Response to Community Hotspots taskforce that was created in the 1990s by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani to enforce a cabaret law that dated to 1926 and prohibited dancing in spaces that didn’t have a cabaret license. It was later repealed, to great local fanfare, in 2017, by Bill DeBlasio.
Now, half a decade later, DeBlasio’s successor Eric Adams says there’s no more need to MARCH. In a press conference in late December at Paragon, the nightlife-loving mayor admitted that the police initiative had been “extremely abusive and intrusive” to small businesses and its customers.
Barclay says that he remembers Bossa, which did not have a cabaret license, getting raided by the MARCH task force in its early years. According to a report in the New York Times the year the law was repealed, “only 97” establishments in the city even had a cabaret license, something that owners blamed on a “costly and time-consuming” bureaucratic process that had required “the approval of several agencies.”
“You’re enjoying a cocktail after work, you think what is happening right now? Whatever it is, it’s very major, because they wouldn’t put out this much effort for something that’s benign,” said Barclay.
For clubs, the effects of these raids were damaging and at times fatal. DIY music spaces in the Bushwick area were often hit hard by MARCH; spots like the Palisades and the Silent Bar cited the raids for forcing them to close.
Ali Coleman, a DJ, club promoter, and nightlife advocate with the House Coalition and Dance Liberation Network recalls an early MARCH raid at Sound Factory, a nominally gay club that attracted a large cross-section of New Yorkers in Chelsea. One early night in 1995, Coleman recalls the police, fire department, and health department all showing up at Sound Factory.
“We are dancing, partying, and all of a sudden the lights come on, and we see firemen. The lights go off, we dance again. Two hours later, the lights go on again, and that is the end of Sound Factory,” said Coleman. According to Coleman, closure of prominent clubs drove the nightlife scene underground for a while.
Barclay says that in 2017 he started organizing club owners to stop these raids, which had continued after the repeal of the cabaret law in response to 311 calls that cite “quality of life” noise complaints.
After the Ghost Ship fire tragedy on the other side of the country in Oakland, Barclay said law enforcement operations across the country tightened their approach to nightlife, leading to more regular raids even for matters that Barclay complains are trivial.
“We had the fire department at Bossa come in, I think it was two or three times during a week for a random, unannounced inspection,” Barclay recalls. “One of the times they came in, it was 9 p.m — there was literally one guy bopping around on the dance floor, I wouldn’t even call it dancing, he was just bopping his head — [and] the FDNY inspector looks at me and goes, ‘you know he’s not allowed to dance, right?’”
As Barclay puts it, the threat of surprise raids continued to loom over the city’s nightlife scene.
Per a well-read story from Liz Pelly that appeared in the Baffler in 2018, an anonymous Brooklyn music venue employee complained about police claiming to show up for a business inspection and then later missing tickets for noise and issues in their kitchen, an unexpected visit from the MARCH squad as a result of noise complaint from a new neighbor who later claimed to be surprised that using the city’s online 311 form resulted in action by local police.
“This is an era of no more demonizing successful businesses, but promoting, lifting them up,” claims Eric Adams, who says MARCH will be replaced with a different group called CURE, which stands for Coordinating a United Resolution with Establishments.
This group promises greater communication between law enforcement age ncies and business owners rather than relying on unannounced raids and will be led by Jeffrey Garcia, a well-connected businessman who owns a restaurant in the Bronx called Mon Amour Coffee & Wine and a pizza spot in Washington Heights and also has run the New York State Latino Restaurant, Bar, and Lounge Association (NYSRBLA) for the past five years. Garcia is also a retired New York City Police Department (NYPD) first grade detective of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, where he was aware of MARCH operations happening in the precinct level.
Later as the president of NYSRBLA, Garcia said he was committed to uplifting the industry and aware of the disruptiveness of MARCH on businesses. Last year, Adams appointed him to the city’s next head of the city’s Office of Nightlife, taking the place of the agency’s first ceremonial “Night Mayor.”
Garcia says that both business owners and local police are embracing this new development.
“[Disbanding MARCH] has been at the top of my priorities and the administration’s priority. There were parts of MARCH that were discriminatory and it did not serve the community anymore, so it was the right time to disband it,” Garcia told me in a brief zoom call.
Local clubs seem wary of commenting on the change. “I can’t help but feel like commenting may not be in our best interest,” a manager from H0L0 texted me.
When asked for comment, a representative from Elsewhere wrote that the club’s management had “chosen to pass on this opportunity.”
According to Garcia’s office, the new CURE process will involve several steps of communication and monitoring.
There will be a special operations lieutenant from the precinct who will make an initial, in-person contact with the business during the day. The precinct is then required to monitor the conditions for a minimum of three weeks, if conditions are not improved, they are then called in for a meeting with the precinct commander. Venues may also get a letter giving them a 30-day notice for an inspection, if conditions do not improve. Only agencies that the police determine are directly connected to the complaint will be present for the inspection, which differs from MARCH where seemingly random agencies would show up during raids.
“ONL would be liaising between the business and the precinct officials at every step to ensure the business has the opportunity to know what the complaints are,” read a statement that Garcia’s office sent afterward.
Olympia Kazi says she wasn’t surprised by Adams’ move to disband MARCH. A founding member of a group called the NYC Artist Coalition and once the vice chair of the nightlife advisory board appointed under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Kazi is more skeptical about the motives of the administration. Her group had pushed for transparency data from the city regarding its use of the MARCH taskforce, which soon after caused its operations to steadily decline, from 23 in the first half of 2020 to absolute zero in 2023.
“The moment we shine[d] a light on it, [the MARCH task force] became impractical, because they could no longer demonstrate the need for such a force. Why this business and not the business next door?” Kazi told me.
Others are skeptical too. Bob Holden, a councilman who represents neighborhoods like Ridgewood and Middle Village, has been outspoken in criticizing Adams’ approach to what Holden calls “rogue businesses.” In an interview with John Catsimatidis, the billionaire grocery story magnate who also owns a radio station called WABC where Catsimatidis runs a talk show called “The Cats Roundtable,” Holden warned the host that “we’re starting to resemble a Third World country in the streets of New York City and people are fed up.”
In response to an email, Holden spokesperson Daniel Kurzyna wrote: “While infrequently used, MARCH operations dealt with businesses flouting the law and showing no concern for their neighbors. Moving to a more lenient, ‘kid’s glove’ approach will only add more layers of bureaucracy, which could backfire.”
Kazi, the nightlife activist, says that she thinks Adams’ efforts to support local nightlife businesses won’t do a lot to support the artists who perform there either, telling me she would rather see an increase in funding for the city’s library system, the subject of some political debate in recent months.
“This is pro-business. [Adams] has a specific idea about what nightlife is and how we help businesses, and I believe our approach is always more inclusive and more community oriented.”
Top photo taken by taken by Katarina Hybenova for Bushwick Daily.
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