Tuesday, August 08, 2000
Festival controversy continues
Restaurateurs, black leaders meet
By Randy Tucker
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Ujima Cinci-Bration and Coors Light Festival ended more than a week ago, but a controversy still resonates from the event, during which at least eight downtown restaurant owners closed.
Some members of Cincinnati's African-American community have accused white restaurant operators of unfair and race-based practices for denying the mostly black jazz fest patrons access to their eateries.
The restaurant owners deny the accusations, which led Cincinnati Councilman Paul Booth to seek a federal inquiry into whether the restaurants violated public accommodations laws.
Some of the restaurateurs have agreed to meet with black leaders today to explain their decisions to close during the festival, which attracted an estimated 150,000 people, about half of them from outside Cincinnati.
The informal gathering, requested by the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce, is to be held this morning at the Greater Cincinnati Restaurant Association's headquarters downtown on Ninth Street.
The owners are expected to reiterate that they simply couldn't make money during the weekend because festivalgoers wouldn't fill up their restaurants, and that the congestion and traffic-control measures enforced by the city would discourage local residents from eating downtown.
“We've heard that before,” said Kathye Lewis, board chairman for the black
chamber of commerce. “But we also know that they stay open on other weekends when they don't make a lot of money. We want to get very specific and detailed about this particular weekend and why the restaurants feel a need to close.”
Economists, tourism experts and members of restaurant associations in other parts of the country that host music festivals aimed at black audiences also find the restaurant operators' arguments hard to swallow.
“It just seems kind of ridiculous,” said Jeffrey M. Humphrey, an economic forecaster at the University of Georgia's Selig Center For Economic Growth.
Mr. Humphrey, who has studied the spending patterns of tourists, said downtown restaurants typically thrive on the traffic generated by music festivals, regardless of the race of attendees, because the events usually attract large numbers of visitors from out of town.
And those travelers generally eat at the restaurants closest to where they are staying, he said.
Many of the estimated 75,000 out-of-towners at the Ujima-Coors Light festival packed downtown hotels.
“It's not like a football game, where people are tailgating and bringing their own food and drink,” Mr. Humphrey said.
Mr. Humphrey also disputed the argument that because blacks overall have lower average incomes than whites, they are less likely to eat out at expensive restaurants when they're on the road.
“That argument just doesn't hold water,” Mr. Humphrey said. “African-Americans' daily expenditure patterns are about the same as any traveler.”
But owners of several downtown restaurants that closed during the festival said business typically has been slow in past years when they've elected to remain open during the jazz fest, giving them little incentive to open this year.
“We were always open for the jazz festival in the past, but it was never a busy weekend for us,” said Michael Comisar, co-owner of the Maisonette.
Yet the manager of at least one downtown restaurant that has never closed during the festival said business is usually solid — and he actually saw an uptick this year.
“We're never closed for that weekend,” said Tim Shaughnessy, who manages Morton's of Chicago downtown. “We see no reason not to be open.”
But Mr. Comisar said Morton's diners didn't have to deal with the same potential traffic restrictions as his customers.
He said the main reason he and co-owner Nat Comisar decided to close the Maisonette and the adjacent La Normandie this year was because the city threatened to shut Sixth Street — the main access to the restaurant — to prevent gridlock. (Sixth Street, however, was not closed.)
Jeff Ruby expressed similar concern about the city's traffic-control measures, which he said would have hurt access to his restaurant, Jeff Ruby's at Seventh and Walnut streets.
“If Elvis came back and did a show at Cinergy, I don't think they'd block off as many of the streets” as the city did for the jazz festival, he said.
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