Of all the changes taking place in the Warehouse Block over the the next several months, perhaps the most high profile is that surrounding National Avenue music venue Cosmic Charlie’s, which announced plans in March to shutter its National Avenue location this summer and relocate to a new venue.
“No, we are not closing due to complaints from our new neighbors. Yes, we are moving to a new location more suited to our business model,” read a statement posted by the venue on Facebook in March.
Cosmic Charlie’s owner Mark Evans and property manager Chad Walker both confirmed that the two parties came to a mutual agreement in March allowing the venue to be released early from its long-term lease at 723 National Ave. The move follows a well-documented series of noise complaints over the past 18 months from longtime residents of Aurora Avenue, a quiet residential street a block away from the venue.
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Cosmic Charlie’s moved from its original Woodland Avenue location in 2016 to a former industrial warehouse on National Avenue that was retro-fitted specifically for the venue. The business hosts live music of various genres, from bluegrass and folk to hip hop, metal and electronic dance music, an average of four to six nights a week. While it was most often the latter bass-heavy genres that elicited complaints from neighbors, complaints were reported even during evenings when the venue was hosting movie nights.
It was a situation that caused much frustration and puzzlement for neighbors, as well as for the venue owners and for Walker, who said he spent many evenings in the neighborhood responding to late-night phone calls and texts – armed with a decibel reader that he says rarely picked up noise levels louder than passing traffic on the nearby Winchester Road. Ultimately, he says, it was the bass frequencies causing the issue, rather than the volume of sound itself.
“I don’t think that when you’re in the venue, at least from my experience, that the sound is unbearably loud,” said Aurora Avenue resident Jo Mackaby, a linguistics professor and bass player herself, who says she has attended shows at the venue on several occasions.
But when heard from the comfort of her home, Mackaby said, the experience was quite different.
“It sounds very much like there’s a low-rider with a tricked-out stereo system rattling right inside your house,” she said. “I’ve never experienced anything quite like it.”
“The first time we noticed it, [it] was like there was a war happening over there,” described fellow Aurora Avenue neighbor David Bartley. “You could feel the vibrations on my front porch rattling my house.”
Mackaby and Bartley are among the neighbors whose homes are situated in a direct line from the venue and who have described the past year and a half as being fraught with anxiety-inducing tensions that have affected their sleep and other aspects of their lives.
Chris Yarber, a landscape architect who has found himself at the center of the tensions between the neighborhood and the venue and developers, says he has stayed at his mother’s house, unable to sleep at his Aurora Avenue bungalow, several nights a week for the past year. He attributes the noise problem to several factors, including “poor insulation” in the tin building that houses Cosmic Charlie’s, and the position of the stage, which he says tunnels the noise directly to his street.
“There’s this corridor that the music shoots down – it’s a concrete jungle,” he said. “There’s a concrete parking lot, concrete blocks and it just bounces all around.”
“It channels in pockets somehow,” Bartley said of the sound.
Lexington Police Department public information officer Jervis Middleton explained that local law defines noise disturbances as a sound that “endangers or injures persons or property, or which annoy[s] or disturb[s] a reasonable person of normal sensitivities.” This can include anything from dogs barking to power tools being operated during certain hours of the day, to operating music “in such a manner as to create a noise disturbance across a dwelling unit boundary.”
An open records request shows the Lexington Police Department responded to more than 200 noise complaints directed at Cosmic Charlie’s between October 2016 and March 2018. Citations were given to the venue on at least 40 occasions during that period according to the records, while at least 70 of the incidents were documented as “unfounded complaints.”
Walker and Evans both gave their cell phone numbers to neighbors in an attempt to keep an open dialogue and to keep tensions at bay while they were working on solutions they hoped would mitigate the noise, which included installing additional sound batting and sealing off the glass-paneled garage door at the front of the building.
“There were actually three different sound engineers that came in and said ‘this will fix it,’” said Walker. He estimates that Walker Properties and Cosmic Charlie’s each spent more $10,000 on efforts to fix the problem. “We tried for months and months to come to a solution.”
Cosmic Charlie’s will host its last show at the current location on June 15, and is currently pursuing plans to move to a new venue with a larger capacity, which Evans said will expand opportunities for shows that are currently out of range for the venue. While specific details on a potential new location have not yet been finalized, the venue has submitted a “letter of intent” to owners of a property that its hopeful will work out.
Evans – who went door-to-door during the dispute to keep the neighbors updated on plans to mitigate the problem, and even offer them free concert tickets in attempt to keep friendly relations – says he is disappointed that the current location didn’t work out, but he hopes that a business better suited for the neighborhood will succeed Cosmic Charlie’s in that location. He also said hopes he is confident that its future location will be a better fit for Cosmic Charlie’s
“I hope that our neighbors at Kenwick will come see us at the new spot and that we can put it all behind us,” Evans said.