2010 was not a particularly pleasant year for venue/police relations -- see Market Hotel or Santos Party House -- and 2011 unfortunately got off on the wrong foot immediately. Ridgewood Masonic Temple, the pretty great Bushwick spot that hosted shows last year by Sleigh Bells, Das Racist, Lightning Bolt, and various others, is going dry, according to a bushwick.bk.com report on recent liquor-license snafus there that finally raised the ire of the cops. As a result, the Titus Andronicus/Real Estate show planned there for New Year's Eve by promoter extraordinaire Todd P was moved last-minute to a more, y'know, festive location. As Todd put it:

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The door at Coco66, circa October 26th.

When last we checked in with Greenpoint's Coco66, the club had been raided in the midst of CMJ, shuttered for the crime of having 350 people crammed into a 75 person capacity venue. The venue first told us that "we were misinformed by the NYPD" and that they "didn't have to close at all"; later, that story changed to them taking "couple days off and make some renovations to just kind of move forward and become a better venue with more space for people." Whether this was a genuine statement or the words of a club trying to comply with a NYC Department of Buildings complain in a hurry ("a couple days" stretched to a couple weeks at least), we never quite ascertained, but the club has been closed--even for non-musical activities like brunch--since October. But according to Brooklyn Vegan, they've been open as a bar since this past Tuesday, and for the first time since October 25th, live music is on tonight's schedule.

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Those who stopped by the recently beleaguered Santos Party House last weekend would have found the place incongruously shuttered, and Friday's regular party, the Just Blaze/DJ Soul-hosted reOPENed, mysteriously absent. This was fall-out from the club's "legal wrangling," in the words of a Santos spokesman, with the city over drug deals that went down in the venue over the summer. Since the raid on their property, Santos has been operating as a live music venue, but not yet as a dance club again, but sometimes the difference has been unclear. ("Our apology goes out to everyone who came by the party last week and to anybody we may have inconvenienced," wrote the reOPENed kids a couple weeks ago.) They were supposed to come back this Friday, but the club tells us that reOPENed's return has been pushed back another two weeks. But still: at long last, dance music is coming back to Santos Party House. With a special guest, no less...

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Embattled venue Santos Party House was poised for a big, free, booze-soaked victory party tonight after winning a provisional victory in court on Monday against the city that shut them down, but alas, it was not to be, apparently. A club spokesman writes to tell us that tonight's Transgendered Jesus/Hooray For Goodbye/etc. show has been cancelled. They'll try instead to fully throw off the shackles of police oppression at tomorrow's (nearly sold out) Duke Spirit concert:

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Update: The club is now reopening on Wednesday, one day later. More info here.

So says the beleaguered club's Twitter account, a statement confirmed by a club spokesman who tells us that, starting tomorrow, "we're officially allowed to be open." Closed Thursday night in a police raid over third party drug charges that date back to June, July, and August, Santos will have endured five long nights of darkness when the lights go on tomorrow. The final body count? Thursday's Ninja Tune anniversary celebration, Friday's Reopened thing with Just Blaze, and a bonkers Halloween night that was set to include the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and a loaded, Choice C*nts/Kostume Kult-promoted Voodoo Buggaloo DJ lineup. It was probably not a coincidence that they got shutdown over Halloween weekend, nor were they the only ones. But at least they're back now. As the club's spokesman tells us:

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Last Friday night, in the midst of CMJ, cops raided the Greenpoint venue Coco66, shutting the venue down for the weekend and necessitating a hasty week's worth of construction to get the place up to code. On Thursday, the police hit Santos Party House, using months-old drug charges to shutter the popular venue on the eve of Halloween weekend. And on Saturday night, north Brooklyn's 171 Lombardy was hit, as cops arrived in the middle of the Pelly Twins and Todd P-presented Mischief Night concert there (featuring the Smith Westerns, Dom, and new SOTC crushes Sweet Bulbs) and broke the party up. Luckily, the show found a new home at the Silent Barn, and Dom went on there in the venue's kitchen, circa 4 a.m.

Still, that makes three in a week--four if you count the West Village's Love, which was reportedly shut down recently as well. Was 171 Lombardy part of a pattern of potentially Halloween-fueled, stepped up nightlife enforcement by the NYPD? Or was it an isolated incident, business as usual at a venue that is only quasi-legal to being with? Promoter Todd Patrick--one of the people behind Saturday's show--leans toward the latter. "These three shutdowns are a suspicious coincidence," he told us, "but I see a lot of evidence that they originated from initiatives by three very different agencies within the police, and under very different circumstances." One man's conjecture, but no promoter is more active in Brooklyn than Patrick is. The rest of his take:

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The still-shuttered club, circa this afternoon.

When the cops raided Santos Party House last night and shut the club down, just hours before Ninja Tune's 20th anniversary party was set to jump off, many noted that the timing of the raid was suspicious: right before Halloween weekend, typically a lucrative and busy couple days for NYC-area clubs. (Coco66, in Greenpoint, was shut down just last week; the West Village club Love is also rumored to have been raided and closed recently.) Was the timing of the club's shuttering coincidental, or spitefully deliberate? A look at the summons--obtained this afternoon from the Civil Supreme Court downtown, where it was just filed--suggests that it was deliberate: the NYPD shut down Santos on a complaint relating to three drug charges, the most recent of which was all the way back on August 13th, 2010.

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On the door at Santos. All photographs by Puja Patel.

See an update here: The Excuse Cops Used to Raid Santos Party House Last Night? Nearly Three-Month-Old Drug Charges

The notice went up abruptly last night, just hours before Ninja Tune's 20th anniversary party was scheduled to kick off at the downtown club Santos Party House: "NINJA TUNE XX NYC HAS BEEN MOVE TO BOULEVARD 199 BOWERY AT SPRING." Why? See the sign above, which was taped to the door of the venue when our photographer/operative Puja Patel got down there. (The notice alleges: "Criminal sale or possession of controlled substances, marihuana, or for any other violation of Articles 220 and/or 221 of New York State Penal Law." Articles 220 and 221 set criminal penalties for possession or sale of, yup, marijuana.) A promoter-affiliated door person we spoke with said that she had just arrived at Santos to set up for the party when the police came to shut the venue down. They were told they had to leave because no one was allowed in the building. Which is indeed what the signs posted outside say:

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Yesterday, a manager at the beleaguered Greenpoint club Coco66 promised us that despite a police raid on Friday that momentarily closed the venue, they were reopening at regular capacity this week--"we didn't have to close at all," they told us. But this morning, we noticed that every show booked this week at the space seemed to be cancelled or, more accurately, and in the words the club itself, "moved to a different venue." Huh? We reached out for clarification and later received this message from Josh, the club's manager:

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That's Coco66's address alright. Photo via

Update: Says the club's manager: "We're reopening at 4 p.m. today." See more below.

Lost in a weekend's worth of CMJ-related chaos was the fact that on Friday night, the NYPD raided the Greenpoint venue Coco66, halting the Tamaryn/Frankie Rose & the Outs show that was underway and reportedly shutting down the venue indefinitely. The above photo, just posted to Tamaryn's Facebook page--the show was ended during her set, after she'd only played three songs--would seem to bear that theory out. (The venue's address is indeed 66 Greenpoint Avenue.) We've reached out to both the venue and its manager, but have yet to hear back. In the meantime, the man who put on the show, promoter Seva Granik, says Coco66 is in dire trouble. According to him, the "NYPD apparently has been showing up for weeks, warning the venue about various things that the owner was supposed to go take care of." We asked what went down on Friday, specifically:

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