To college students who frequent Charles Village, the neighborhood's rapid growth in the past few years has been an economic and social triumph, but a recent zoning dispute involving the Den Lounge, located on the second floor of Tamber's Nifty Fifties Diner on St. Paul Street, highlights another side of the story.
The Den will have to close, according to David Tanner of the Baltimore City Zoning Board. After two hearings this year, on March 29 and June 26, the city found the Den in violation of zoning ordinances that prohibit establishments on the second floors of row houses adjacent to similar houses.
Currently Tanner is drafting the decision to be finished next week. The verdict will then be enforced and the Den will be shut down unless the owners appeal to the circuit court.
In Tanner's opinion, though they have the right to appeal, the lounge is operating on borrowed time and will not be able to stay open much longer.
"We follow the letter of the law and have never done anything wrong. This place is not a rowdy club. It's a cool lounge where people can stay in the community and have a good time without getting into trouble," owner Dave Weishaus said.
The legality of the Den's location was brought into question when their neighbor, Mary Darago, complained to the city about the noise level.
"I have been in living hell since [Den] started [construction]," Darago said.
Darago, who has lived in the same row house on St. Paul Street for years now, was there when Tamber's opened in 1991. At the time it occupied a smaller building on the corner of St. Paul and East 34th Streets, with a house in between the restaurant and Darago. However construction began in 2002 to add the Den Lounge on the top floor of Tamber's, and the house next door that abutted Mary Darago's property was torn down to add space to the Tamber's/Den property.
That was when problems began for Darago. She described extensive damages that she claims occurred as a result of the construction, and expressed dismay with how much money she has had to spend fixing the damage - with almost no reimbursement from the owners, whom she blames for the damage.
She claimed that recent water damage to her ceiling, costing her $4,370.00 to repair, was a result of the construction. In addition she claimed that her back steps were torn out of the building in the remodeling process, leaving a hole in the outside wall that allowed a rat to enter her home.
"I have had nothing but problems from them," she said in reference to the property owners (Harkesh Sharma and Pardeep Kumar) and the Den's owners. "They have been very rude and very uncooperative."
She believes they owe her over $12,000 for the damage caused to her home.
Poly and Weishaus paid her $3,000 when she threatened to sue a short time ago, but she insists that the sum does not come close to how much they owe her for the damage they have caused. Darago asked Sharma about two weeks ago to reimburse her $4,370 for the water damage. He refused, she said.
"They're never going to pay me back, are they?" she asked in exasperation.
Other problems exist besides the ones caused by the construction. Darago alleged that the Den plays loud music with a speaker against the wall that is shared with her house.
After the Den opened in July 2006 at Darago's request, an inspector from the Health Department came by and used a meter to test the noise in the lounge on a Saturday night.
Weishaus, a 2003 Hopkins graduate, said that the lounge is not noisy and that the health inspector got a reading of 46 decibels, when 56 decibels is the limit.
Darago still plans to call the Baltimore Liquor Board again to have an inspector come by and give another opinion.
Darago has other complaints as well. In 2003 Sharma and Kumar applied for a liquor license for the building, which Darago says was not done with enough notice to the neighbors.
Sharma and Weishaus both said that Darago has been impolite and overreacts to occurrences in and around the building.
"I tell her that she can come in and have dinner here, and she tells me, 'go to hell,'" Sharma said. "She calls me mean names and even says mean things to my kids when they are outside."
He suggested that a major part of the problem was the college students in the area, who make a lot of noise on weekend nights and into the early morning, often passing by the row houses where the Den and Darago are situated.
Since the inspectors established that the noise from the Den was insignificant, Weishaus suggested that the noise about which Darago complains must be street noise.
Weishaus was also concerned about Darago's interaction with Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke, representative for District 14, which includes Charles Village. Darago confirms that she called Clarke about a year ago for help when she sued the owners and tried to get the Den shut down.
Since then the situation has intensified to the limit. Clarke made it part of her political agenda to help reduce noise and disorder in Charles Village, famously getting Hopkins' fraternity Phi Kappa Psi evicted from their house in Canterbury last year. She has been working in conjunction with the nuisance statute that Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore City council president, is currently trying to pass.
Weishaus discussed the bill with fury, correctly saying that it could "get people kicked out of their homes for making too much noise."
He also pointed out that Clarke allied herself with Darago in an election year.
"Mary Pat Clarke has not gone about helping the community in the right way," Weishaus said. "She's been an elected official for the past thirty years in a city that has the highest murder rate in the country and one of the lowest education rates. Maybe she should work on her stance and do a better job of voting on issues if she really wants to make a positive change, rather than trying to shut down businesses for a good cause."
Having his bar attacked by the city and neighbors is especially frustrating for him since he is a new small business owner.
"She helped herself out here by sticking up for the little guy, but in this case she's wrong. I'm the little guy too," he said in frustration.
Indeed Weishaus's vision for his project hardly seems like a maleficent one. He started the Den because he wanted "a safe place where 21 and 22-year-old students could go late at night when they want something to eat, but in a cool and clean environment where they don't have to walk very far into a bad neighborhood for something fun to do."
For now the city will have to make the difficult decisions about who really is "the little guy" in this situation, whether it be a young business owner, new to the community, or an elderly woman suddenly having to become accustomed to more bustle on her block than ever before.
In the meantime Hopkins students will have to go on witnessing the squabble and taking advantage of the ever-changing Charles Village social scene while they still can.
