The tougher ordinance, the court challenge, and the buyout

2003 — 2007

The campaign and the law: By 2003 a citizens' campaign, Citizens for Community Values, was claiming in the South Bend Tribune's pages a share of the credit for "a new, tougher adult business ordinance," aimed chiefly at limiting the hours of the city's adult businesses. The campaign's published account counts six strip bars and the largest adult bookstore in Indiana operating in the city, and records the support the ordinance carried: the mayor, two prosecutors, two police chiefs, the Common Council, and the county council. The same account records that two strip bar owners challenged the ordinance in court, and that testimony was taken; the same season, the county alcohol board renewed the Teaser's nightclub's liquor license over organized opposition. No reported opinion in the ordinance challenge has been found in the record reached — it belongs to the class of adult-trade litigation that is fought in trial courts and ends in settlement rather than in the law reports.

The end, by purchase: The challenge and the city ended their fight the way the Bars & Nightclubs section of this history tells in full: by settlement, the city purchased the properties of three adult businesses on South Michigan Street from their owner, who kept the liquor licenses to sell — one of them passing to a steakhouse chain for a new restaurant — and the street's adult-bar era closed by purchase rather than by prosecution. Whether the settled lawsuit was the same court challenge the 2003 campaign described cannot be confirmed from the record reached, and the join is printed as open. For this section the point is the boundary the whole episode respects: from 1976 to 2007 the city's adult-trade fights were all against commercial, public-facing businesses — bookstores, cabarets, lounges. No defendant, licensee, or litigant in any of them was a private social club.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune (2003), as indexed in the newspaper's ProQuest archive — the Citizens for Community Values letter: the tougher ordinance aimed at hours of operation, the six strip bars and the state's largest adult bookstore, the unanimous official support claimed, the court challenge by two owners, and the writer's testimony; and the paper's 2003 report of the St. Joseph County alcohol board's renewal of the Teaser's liquor license over opposition.
2. Bars & Nightclubs section of this history — the Tribune's 2005–2007 reporting of the South Michigan adult bars and the city's purchase of the three properties in settlement of the adult-business-ordinance lawsuit, the licenses retained and resold; cross-referenced here, not retold.