Friday, September 15, 2000
Downtown eateries open this weekend
Police: Street closings same as for Ujima
By Robert Anglen
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Downtown restaurants that locked their doors during Ujima Cincibration will leave them open for Oktoberfest.
Restaurant owners say that's because the streets blocked off in July won't be closed this weekend, when 500,000 people descend on Fifth Street.
But Cincinnati Police officials said Thursday that is not true, and the streets closed during the Ujima festival celebrating African American heritage are the same ones that will be closed during Oktoberfest.
They also said traffic for this year's Ujima festival was better than the previous two years when there was massive gridlock downtown.
“The street closures are similar for both events,” said Division 1 Police Commander Vincent Demasi. “The big problem with Ujima is cruising, and we did have to add street closures after 11 p.m.”
That's the time several downtown restaurants regularly stop serving dinner.
The decision to close restaurants during Ujima has sparked outrage among African-Americans — and a revolving picket of restaurants by the Cincinnati Black United Front — which says the decision was racially motivated.
“It has nothing to do with black or white,” said Mike Comisar, co-owner of Mai sonette. “Street closures is the whole reason.”
He said business owners were given a list of possible street closures by the Public Safety Department that would have cut off access to his restaurant.
Except for the street closures, he said Ujima and Oktoberfest “are almost the same identical thing,” with food booths and entertainment venues up and down Fifth Street.
Jeff Ruby, owner of Jeff Ruby's Steak House, said the difference between Oktoberfest and Ujima is that “all of downtown won't be blocked off.”
He said the decision to close was based on customers not being able to get to his business, that it was purely economics.
“If I find out business was off substantially during Oktoberfest, then I'll close next year on Oktoberfest and all of the Germans can protest,” he said. “When the city closes the doors to downtown, then how can you open yours?”
During Oktoberfest, Mr. Ruby said, “Fifth Street will be the only street closed.”
Police confirmed that five blocks of Fifth Street, from Race Street to Broadway, will be closed. But Mr. Demasi said that was the same area closed during Ujima before 11 p.m.
The two festivals attract different kinds of revelers, with Oktoberfest bringing in older local residents and Ujima bringing in a younger crowd from all over the eastern United States.
He said Ujima and the Cincinnati Coors Light Jazz Festival — which occur on the same weekend — also attract many more people and shut down about three hours later than Oktoberfest, around 2 a.m.
Other restaurant owners said the closings were based on a lack of traffic; whether from street closings or something else, regular customers didn't show up.
“Oktoberfest doesn't have the same impact on business,” said John Gaines, general manager of Redfish, which closed two hours early during Ujima.
“Unfortunately we don't do business during Ujima,” he said, adding that during Oktoberfest business is down only by 5 percent. “I think that is because there is a mistaken perception that downtown is not safe during the jazz festival, which is not true.”
He agrees there is an “undercurrent of racism” among patrons who stay away from downtown during Ujima.
“That is coming from the community at large,” he said. “Closing was purely a financial issue.”
But restaurants will continue to be the focus of pickets, said the Rev. Damon Lynch III, Black United Front spokesman, who questions why restaurants don't close early on other days.
“We are embarrassed and ashamed of our city's showy display of invidious racism,” he said in a press release last week. “We demand that things change.”
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