City officials have put a halt to hoofing at Hogs & Heifers, a downtown honky-tonk known for its collection of celebrity bras donated by visitors like Roberts, Barrymore and Darryl Hannah.
Those stars and other patrons have been known to mount the Hogs & Heifers bar in spontaneous bursts of late-night dancing. But it turns out a Prohibition-era ordinance requires a cabaret license for such footloose activity.
Last Thursday night, Hogs & Heifer owner Allen Dell said, a dozen police officers walked in, told him that undercover cops had witnessed dancing in the bar the previous weekend, and shut him down.
"It's a sad world when they padlock a guy for dancing," Dell said.
He went to court the next day and got the bar reopened.
And despite signs inside and out reading "No Dancing by Order of New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, Cabaret Division," at least a dozen patrons on a recent weeknight were bopping to country music blaring from the jukebox.
"Music is about dancing. Music is about therapy," said Helen Glantz of London, gyrating with a friend to D.A. Coe's "Never Even Called My Name."
Shonna Keogan, a spokesperson for the Department of Consumer Affairs, said the city is simply enforcing the law evenhandedly.
The ordinance is normally used against bars whose unlicensed activities annoy people living nearby. Hogs & Heifers is in the city's meat packing district, and Keogan said she doesn't know whether anyone complained, but "it would be unfair of us to be giving padlocks to bars in residential areas and not to Hogs & Heifers."
Dell said that he applied for a cabaret license months ago and spent $70,000 on sprinklers, lighting and other code requirements but that the city lost the paperwork.
Besides, Dell said, "The mayor and his son were seen dancing on television along with 50,000 other people at Yankee Stadium, doing the Macarena. Yankee Stadium sells liquor. It doesn't have a cabaret license."
With the right to shake one's rear end apparently imperiled, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union said his group is on the case.
"If Drew Barrymore or Julia Roberts or any woman in the city of New York wants to get up on the bar and wiggle, we don't recommend that, but we might defend that," Norman Siegel said.
AP PHOTO
The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs placed a 'No Dancing' sign on the window of the New York bar Hogs and Heifers on Monday night.