Good news?

The Horoscope is closed! This Garfield bar was right across the street from the Quiet Storm, itself a former nuisance bar that was reborn as a vegetarian coffee shop (and one of our long-time favorite places). For years the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp has been in pursuit of closing the Horoscope. When they first went after it, there were accusations in the neighborhood that it was only the white people that wanted it closed. However, since the drug activity and shootings have increased in the past year, more of the local neighbors of the bar have been cooperating. One of our friends that is active in the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp said people were coming forward with notebooks full of dates and descriptions. The nail in the proverbial coffin was a shooting last week. Now the city has changed padlocked the building.
This has to be bittersweet for the neighborhood. The reason I have punctuated the title of this post with a question mark is that the elements that made the Horoscope a nuisance will just go somewhere else. Whenever I would see a drug deal near my sister's old house only a few blocks from the Horoscope, I figured the police were paying closer attention to Penn and North Graham, pushing the drug dealers a block or two south, closer to the schools (the neighborhood public school and a Waldorf) or a block or two north, another residential area. So, while the news that the Horoscope is no more is something we should cheer, I wonder what other impact it will have to the streets where kids play outside and walk to and from school.