SNOHOMISH — The gunfire that erupted from a First Street tavern was fueled by a night of drinking.
A bartender, notorious for being grumpy, gulped down shot after shot until he was in a furor.
That’s when “Omaha Bill” Wroth grabbed a pistol and let loose three rounds. One slug pierced “Texas Jack” Kinney’s chest. Life spilled from his body. His blood mixed with the mud on First Street, steps away from the Gold Leaf Saloon.
That famous killing took place on a cold night in October 1895. More than a century later, the booze still flows on First Street and the city still grapples with the associated violence.
Just two weeks ago, in the midst of Kla Ha Ya Days, police say as many as 200 people may have stumbled out of bars onto First Street. The situation turned ugly. Three officers were injured and three people were arrested in the melee.
“This is 2009. We should be beyond the reputation of bar brawls on First Street,” Snohomish city councilwoman Lynn Schilaty said. “This isn’t the Wild West; we’re a great town.”
Now, Snohomish Police Chief John Turner has called a meeting with bar owners and city officials to try to find solutions.
He’s talked about installing video surveillance cameras along First Street and taking a harder look at how the city can influence liquor license approvals.
Some bar owners say the people who are drinking need to take responsibility for their own behavior. They’re not optimistic a meeting with officials will help them.
“I don’t think anything good’s going to come out of it for the bar owners,” said Geoff Wall, owner of the Piccadilly Circus, an English-style pub.
Experts, including alcohol policy researchers and liquor industry advocates, say the solution shouldn’t be shouldered alone by either the bar owners or police.
“Local communities need to step in and say, ‘Enough,” said Paul Gruenewald, scientific director of the Prevention Research Center. His organization is a branch of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, Calif., a group known for studying alcohol and drug problems.
Many bars in small area
Nearly 1 in 5 businesses on First Street serves booze. Often, the underlying problem is bar concentration, Gruenewald said.
“The simplest answer is: reduce density,” he said. “What we know is that the greatest concentrations of outlets leads to great violence around those outlets.”
Reducing the number of downtown bars is the same conclusion arrived at in 2007 by an independent group tasked by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to study alcohol problems.
“The obvious answer is using licensing and zoning laws on the local level to cap or reduce outlet density,” Randy Elder said. He’s a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta who helped write the study.
Bars take in more money when they’re packed together. It creates what experts call a mall-effect by allowing patrons to bar hop.
That’s long been the culture in Snohomish.
Several local leaders say they don’t want to close down businesses.
Plus, putting a moratorium on bars is tricky, said Jim Peters, a spokesman for the Responsible Hospitality Institute, a nonprofit group that receives funding from the alcohol and beverage industry.
Pulling communities together to talk often provides the best path toward finding a functional solution, he said.
That can be difficult, because of long-standing tensions, especially between police and business owners.
“They need to talk with each other rather than at each other,” Peters said, “and the same is true for all the stakeholders in the city.”
In Snohomish, some bar owners have been critical of the police chief, especially since he demanded that an annual motorcycle show pay thousands to put more officers on patrol during the event.
Organizers responded by moving their show to Sultan, causing downtown Snohomish bars and other businesses to lose thousands of dollars in revenue.
Others support what Turner has tried to do for the city.
“They don’t want to put anybody out of business. That’s not where he’s going with this; he just wants to keep everybody safe,” said Zouhair Mardini, the owner of Mardini’s Restaurant at the corner of Union Avenue and First Street.
Mardini said he’s calling for the state to launch a campaign to encourage drinkers to know their limits.
“Do we have a problem? Of course we have a problem. Everyone has a problem,” he said.
Problems not unique
Experts who study alcohol trends nationally agree with Mardini: Research shows that binge drinking, especially among young people, is increasing at alarming rates.
“It appears at least that what young people are doing is that they’re drinking harder,” said Edward Kikumoto, a researcher with the Alcohol Policy Network of Oakland, Calif.
Snohomish’s problems are far from unique, he said. Similar communities nationwide are struggling to balance economic development with public safety.
Kikumoto identified four factors that usually foment problems when combined in cities. These are density, hours, clientele and overservice.
In Snohomish:
Many bars stay open until 2 a.m., giving patrons several hours to consume more than enough alcohol.
Young people flock to the bars.
And, according to state records, bartenders are serving too many drinks.
More than half of the downtown Snohomish bars have been ticketed in the past two years for violating state liquor rules on over-serving, according to the state Liquor Control Board.
Bars rely on liquor sales to stay in business and make a profit. Therefore, Kikumoto said, “the tendency for the sellers, the servers, the bartenders to over-serve is inherent.”
Statewide, over-service accounts for about 20 percent of the violations handed out, said Thomas Dixon, an enforcement captain for the state liquor agency. In Snohomish, 90 percent of the violations are for over-service.
That likely will mean additional patrols by state agents.
In Washington, the liquor board controls sales, distribution and regulation.
“They expect us to buy booze from them — from the state — but they’re putting us in a position where we can’t sell it,” pub owner Wall said.
After getting a ticket in February 2008, Mardini said he added two security guards, one assigned exclusively to watch for drunken behavior.
Over-service can lead to serious injuries and death.
Snohomish police point to at least five alcohol-related deaths since July 1996 that they link to First Street.
“I’m sure there are more,” said Turner.
Looking for solutions
The city along the Snohomish River grew out of logging, mills, rowdiness and free-flowing alcohol.
“The early newspapers are full of fun stories of fights,” said Warner Blake, a local historian.
First Street was once known as Whiskey Row.
Old-timers in Snohomish say First Street has always been a place to look for trouble. Fists and fights are as common as beer and whiskey, they say.
Everett historian David Dilgard found no romance or valor in the 1895 killing on First Street.
“It was a drunken argument that ended in tragedy,” Dilgard wrote in his account. “Pointless. Lamentable. Unredeemed by irony or inspiration. Forlorn and meaningless death.”
Today, police and others see the same pointlessness in the violence and culture of inebriation that persists.
The problem seems to be concentrated on the block of First Street between Avenue A and Union Avenue.
In 2002, a Bothell firefighter died in a fight outside a bar, which later went out of business. The building now operates as another bar.
A fight Thanksgiving weekend last year led to a stabbing. On Easter weekend, a fight in The Sports Page Grille and Bar sent a man to Harborview Medical Center with a crushed skull.
Snohomish police officer Chris Marino was punched in the neck and head during the July 19 Kla Ha Ya Days brawl.
“It could have been a riot; it was that close,” he said.
The city needs to come up with both short-term fixes and long-term solutions, Snohomish city manager Larry Bauman said.
To start, over-service needs to stop.
“What we’re looking for primarily is for the ownership and management of the bars to pay attention to that problem,” Bauman said.
Mardini said evaluating how drunk someone is can be nearly impossible.
People sometimes smuggle their own alcohol into the bar, they take drugs, or may have some other condition, he said.
Recently he tried to stop a person whom he believed was drunk only to learn the person had suffered a stroke.
“I’m not God. I can’t get into your head to determine how intoxicated you are,” Mardini said.
Snohomish used to have a commission that took testimony from the public and bar owners during liquor-license reviews. That may be revived, Bauman said.
He’s also interested in statewide legislation that would limit how many bars could be licensed in a small geographic area.
Ultimately cities need to weigh the cost of policing against the benefit of tax revenue generated by bars. Both need to account for the cost that alcohol takes on the community, alcohol researcher Kikumoto said.
Surveillance cameras, added patrols, license enforcement and other ideas likely will take small bites out of a larger problem, he said.
Today’s American culture accepts and evens promotes drinking, he said. That makes preventing further violence on First Street tough.
“It’s very difficult to actually come up with any solutions,” Kikumoto said. “The political reality is, ‘No, we can’t stop this, but what we can do is slow it down.’ ”
Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3437, jholtz@heraldnet.com.
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