Brown: ‘I don’t think there is any hope’

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Street to get them into housing, and help those struggling with mental illness and addiction.

And the city is now enforcing requirements to ensure the parklets adhere to new design standards.

As Mayor Randy Rowse put it last fall, some things have gotten better on State Street while some things have not

“Yeah, there are a lot of problems, but we’ve got programs in line: street cleaning, lighting, patrols,” he said. “Obviously things are not perfect, but things are also not horrific. It’s not Calcutta.”

Mr. Brown, however, remains unimpressed by the city’s efforts to date, doubling down on his criticism of conditions on State Street.

He was asked if he was glad to leave after 30 years downtown.

“Hell, yes,” he said. “State Street is a mess. I was there for 30 years. It was always a battle. Homeless using my bathrooms, eating food off of people’s plates who have gone to bathrooms. Just dealing with all of it. A total mess.

“I don’t think there is any hope given the current leadership at the city to fix things,” he said. “They’re convinced this parklet thing is a win. It’s not.

“The history of parklets across the United States is not good. Most of these parklets are not good. Let’s say the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, 12th Street in Boulder. These are not main thoroughfares. They’re side streets, three to four blocks long. They’ve been somewhat successful, but even those are going through new problems.

“The parklet thing is a problem looking for a solution. It’s not going to work.”

Mr. Brown was asked if he has any fond memories at all of his time downtown.

“Yes,” he said. “State Street in the early ’90s when it was all fresh and new, it was awesome. There were beautiful storefronts and great businesses. People were downtown. It was a place to be proud of. That’s so far in the past it’s hard to believe.”

He was asked how he felt when he closed the restaurant’s doors for the last time.

“Fantastic,” he said. “What a relief. I’m so done with it. So over it. It’s just hard to believe how bad it’s become.”

Still, he does have one regret: not being able to leave the way he wanted to, reducing his prices for diners during the restaurant’s final week.

“Certainly it would have been nice to have gone out the way we planned, but guess what, bro? Life very seldom goes the way we plan. So we did what we did.

“Sure, it would have been lovely to not be losing $15,000 a month, (but) all those articles went out, and everyone thought we were closed and our sales dropped 20% overnight.”

He was asked one final question. Does he have any regrets about going public last fall with his State Street complaints?

“Hell, no,” he said. “I don’t have any regrets about voicing those opinions. My only regret was that it killed sales, and we had to close early.

“I attacked the direction the city is going in. They’ve got their heads in the sand. They do not want to recognize the issues, and if you can’t recognize what the problems are, you can’t fix the problems.

“I would not have done one thing differently. I told the truth. I said what people weren’t willing to say.” email: nhartsteinnewspress@gmail.com