A protest was scheduled Wednesday night in Northeast Philadelphia outside Albert’s Café, the owner of which has locked the doors on the adjoining LGBT club.
House of Blaze, situated on the second floor of Albert’s at Grant Avenue and Academy Road, has been closed since July 3, pending an ongoing rent dispute with the building’s owner.
Blaze Waters, who runs the LGBT club, said he and Albert Buoncristiano, who owns the building and the downstairs bar and restaurant, had a verbal agreement when he launched the second-floor venture in February of 2008 that the rent would be $2,000 monthly.
Waters, however, said that over the past year-and-a-half Buoncristiano has been “sporadically” raising the rent.
“I’ve never once been late with rent, but he just keeps increasing it,” Waters said. “He would say that the electric’s gone up or he’d turn off the gas until we’d pay more. There’s just no communication. It’s his way or the highway.”
Buoncristiano could not be reached for comment.
Last month, Waters said Buoncristiano charged him $5,000 for the space, and earlier this month notified him that he was increasing the fee to $6,000.
On July 3, the club had to shut down because of what Waters thought was a malfunctioning air conditioner. Waters paid a technician to fix it, but a bartender later discovered that the unit that controls the air to the space, located on the roof, had been shut off and locked.
Waters said he couldn’t keep the bar open in the heat and took his staff to Washington, D.C., for the Fourth of July holiday, during which time he said Buoncristiano called him and told him he wouldn’t turn the air conditioning back on until he received the additional rent.
“He told me, ‘If I don’t have that money, don’t bother trying to open back up,’ and when we got back, there was a lock placed across the outside doors so we can’t get in,” Waters said. “We can’t even get our things out. We have everything — TVs, equipment, spotlights, DJ equipment, speakers — all stuff that I bought.”
Waters went to the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations Tuesday to file a complaint, but said the commission couldn’t take the case, as it was a business-to-business conflict, rather than alleged discrimination against an individual.
Throughout its two-year tenure above Albert’s, Waters said the club has fostered a safe and welcoming environment for LGBTs that he noted is hard to come by in that area of the city.
“The Northeast has needed something like this for a while. We finally have a gay club in this area that’s open seven days a week; it’s not just a bar that has a gay night once a week,” he said. “It’s safe there and always has been.”
He noted that the club is much more than just a watering hole.
“We’ve become a community. And we do great things for our community: We recently helped out a kid who died of AIDS to get a headstone and there was a straight woman in the area dying of AIDS and we had a big benefit for her and were able to raise $8,000, and she died the very next day.”
Waters said he hoped the protest would demonstrate to Buoncristiano the strength of the LGBT community’s commitment to the club.
“I’m hoping he’ll open the doors, come to his senses and give us our community back,” he said.
Waters said he has been contacted by two other venues in the Northeast who have expressed interest in renting space to House of Blaze and, if there is no progress on the rent negotiations, he would consider those options.