Great Job, Saint Paul

The steady trickle of Saint Paul traditions being extinguished by taxes and roaming teams of weasel lawyers and pet plaintiffs continues. The original Snuffy’s is next:

[Snuff’s marketing director Dana] Bach said the decision to close was based on a combination of factors: a rent increase, property tax increases and ADA compliance issues. “It’s making it tough for us to continue operating at this location,” she said.

Of course, Snuffy’s continues to operate elsewhere – Edina, Minnetonka and Bloomington.

But then, that’s the point. Like Saint Paul eateries, old and new, pretty much anyplace is a greener pasture, these days.

10 thoughts on “Great Job, Saint Paul

  1. It occurs to me that the “ADA compliance issues” was a stepping stone along the path (slippery slope?) towards “bake me a cake, homophobe”. Which “started” with the movement against “we don’t serve blacks here”. Even more interesting is how so-called private businesses are now being requested to stop censorship of conservative (non-leftist) voices.

  2. Parts of St. Paul have strict Historic Building codes and draconian rules about renovation.
    Historic buildings are not ADA compliant, generally speaking.
    Snuffy’s on Cleveland is not in a listed historic building, as far as I know, but Snuffy’s hasbeen there for decades, and the building is probably older than the restaurant. It’s a pretty classic St. Paul building, and in a style that the city is trying to encourage more of. There is commercial space on street level and some apartments upstairs (sometimes it’s office space too). The problem for Snuffy’s and other businesses in similar buildings is that they are often 1 or 2 steps up from the street and there is no easy way to make those spaces ADA compliant.

  3. The new Snuffy’s in Bloomington has been pretty crowded almost constantly since it opened.

  4. JDM – good point. The slope we’re sliding down is property rights and the rocks at the bottom are elimination of those rights. The people pushing us down the slope do so intentionally, but justify their actions as furtherance of social improvement.

    Right now, I can decide who I want to invite to dinner in my own home, and who I want to exclude. 60 years ago, I had the same power in my own café. But an unregulated and unplanned society is chaotic, not orderly. Social planners striving to establish Utopia hate messy individualism.

    The civil rights movement gave Congress an excuse to nationalize private spaces used for public purposes, to impose order upon chaos. By declaring every café as a public space, same as a city park, the central government arrogates to itself the power to decide who gets to eat there. The Americans with Disabilities Act goes further by requiring café owners to alter the building to make it easier to get into the café.

    It’s only a matter of time before the social planners expand the regulations beyond cafes to greater society in order to eliminate kulaks, wreckers and saboteurs (for example, deplorable old White men bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles). We’re already seeing the first steps in segregated college housing, on social media, and in banking.

    Utopia is not far away. I hope I die before we arrive.

  5. JD – the issues around the freedom of association are quite interesting.

    Ace’s declaration of real civil rights as opposed to just swapping out one set of rules “we all” have to follow for another.

    As evidenced by the anger with which Ace reacts to the anger of Bill Quick’s original response, this is actually a fault line between Boomers and Gen-Xers. Ace’s argument goes like an explosive shell right at the cornerstone of the edifice started in the 50s and completed in the 60s such that civil rights is not just the equal treatment of all by the State, but a State imposed equal treatment of everyone by all institutions, public and private. While perhaps laudable, this definition has actually become a moniker for policies that attempt to crush differences of opinion and so, to slowly and surely dissolve freedom of association.

    In fact, here’s an even more radical thought: was the civil rights movement really necessary?

    That is: By valorizing Martin Luther King’s intentional (albeit nonviolent) lawbreaking (rather than the less photogenic grunt work of lawmaking, we granted tacit permission to future, inferior individuals to do the same (and worse) for increasingly faddish and socially corrosive causes. If Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, why can’t a butch tranny—his wedding tackle still intact—insist on using the ladies’ room in Parks’ name? And sue if he doesn’t get his way?

  6. Two links… moderated. Dang, there was a response to you, JD, about the freedom of association.

  7. I would bet anything the issue with that location is the rest room. You have to go down a flight of stairs and through part of the kitchen to get to it. Too bad — when we lived in that neighborhood we went to Snuffy’s quite often.

  8. Mickey’s Diner is also facing ADA abuse. There just ain’t no way you make Mickey’s ADA compliant.

    Places such as Snuffy’s know what they’re already facing with higher taxes (and subsequent higher rents), ADA and drive-by lawyering. Oh, and they look ahead to the the $15/hr wage in St. Paul and Minneapolis, and think, “I’ll have this to go.”

  9. Night;

    I thought I read that the original Mickey’s is on the National Register. If they are, I believe they may be exempt from ADA.

  10. Boss, they may have been trying to do that, or succeeded, but about a year ago Mickey’s was mentioned in an article about several old St. Paul restaurants that were under the ADA gun and trying to make deals. The original Red’s Savoy was one of those featured. Red had recently passed, and the long, expensive alterations required was a big factor in the family closing the place.

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