The party is over at West Chelsea’s Club Mumbai

Volume One, Issue 17, January 19 - 25, 2007

By Albert Amateau

The State Liquor Authority last week imposed a two-year liquor license revocation on the troublesome Club Mumbai – also known as City – and then ruled that the location at 250 W. 26th St. would also have a two-year license ban.

The club’s license was lifted because of dozens of underage drinking, disorderly premises and building and noise violations over the past four years, according to William Crowley, spokesperson for the S.L.A.

The agency sent notices of every violation to HAG Realty L.L.C., landlord of the club, said Crowley. “That’s why the board, at its last meeting on Jan. 10, voted to proscribe the location as well,” he added.

The owner of the property could apply to the S.L.A. to lift the location ban for a new club operator, but the agency will be on the alert for a bona fide new license applicant, Crowley said.

In 2006, the S.L.A. began regulating troublesome premises more strictly than in the several years prior. Of the 203 licenses that were suspended last year, 78 included two-year proscriptions on the locations of the offending premises, Crowley said.

In December 2004, Community Board 4 urged the S.L.A. not to renew Mumbai’s license because neighbors had been complaining for two years that noise, garbage in the street and rowdy patrons made life on the block between Seventh and Eighth Aves. impossible.

But it was too late because the S.L.A. had issued a license at the end of November 2004 for the premises known as City in the same location. The S.L.A. later discovered that City was still on record as doing business as Mumbai under the ownership of Brahm Prasad, owner of Mumbai.

Prasad said last week that the club operates within the law and charged Mumbai — or City — was the victim of racial discrimination because its hip-hop events attract mostly young African-American patrons. It was a charge he leveled two years ago when he responded to Community Board 4 complaints.

He insisted back then that the club had done everything right and that the complaints came “from a handful of residents who do not want even the best behaved of clubs on their block.”

On Nov. 9, 2004, Prasad and his attorney, Norman Siegel, had appeared at a Community Board 4 Businesses and Licenses Committee meeting and convinced the committee to recommend a license renewal if the club agreed to hire a certified sound engineer to address “repeated complaints by neighbors in adjoining buildings.” Prasad also agreed that his security firm would “increase its efforts to manage rowdy crowds of patrons who congregate in front of the establishment and adjacent buildings.”

But in December 2004, the full board asked the S.L.A. to revoke the license after neighbors said conditions around the club were as bad as ever. “Members said we were demented to recommend a renewal,” said John Weis, committee co-chair, noting the committee had not been aware that conditions had not changed on the block.

Mumbai is the name of the Indian city formerly known as Bombay. The club’s original application in 2002 said it would target a young upscale crowd of Indians living in the city.