The neighboring businesses. By Dezmond Remington.


PREVIOUSLY

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News of the potential return of Sidelines, once one of Arcata’s more notorious watering holes, has hardly filled everyone with glee — and at least one of the nearby businesses has filed a formal complaint. 

The reopening of Sidelines is nowhere close to guaranteed. The department responsible for granting licenses to serve alcohol, California’s Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC), has yet to decide if it’ll allow bar owner Salvatore Costanzo to buy a liquor license for a renewed Sidelines. 

Sherrie Potter, the general manager of the Hotel Arcata, filed a protest with the ABC last week. She asked that they deny Costanzo’s request, pointing out the 2018 narcotics investigation that eventually shut the business down. Sidelines’ patrons were bad for business, she claims, frequently getting in fights, selling drugs, and having public sex outside the hotel and filling second-story hotel rooms with weed and cigarette smoke. Because the bar and the hotel shared a wall, guests could hear “unbearable” amounts of noise from the bar, Potter wrote, “causing guests to check out immediately and vow never to return.”

“The operations of Sidelines Bar had a disastrous effect on the hotel’s business,” she wrote, “making it impossible to operate successfully and causing severe financial harm.”

Potter doesn’t expect it to be different this time around, she told the Outpost. She said past promises hadn’t been kept. (She declined to specify who made them or what they were.) She said it was a “blessing” when Sidelines shut down a year or so after she began her tenure as manager. It was a “party hotel” by then, she said, and it was difficult to recuperate the hotel’s reputation. It wouldn’t outlast a new Sidelines, she said. 

“I am baffled that the city seems to be as behind this as they are, and I can’t believe what short memories everybody seems to have,” Potter said. “…Somebody who just says it’ll be different this time — that doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Potter hasn’t reached out to Costanzo directly. Costanzo told the Outpost he’d fixed past noise problems, but was unaware that there were issues between him and the hotel’s management. He’s planning on adding more noise-cancelling measures to the bar if it reopens. 

Costanzo said he was sorry about the smoke issues.