One of the first indications of trouble for City Winery DC came in a tweet from soul and jazz vocalist Kenny Wesley. On Dec. 8, he announced that his Jan. 5 gig was canceled because the venue was closing down on Jan. 1.  

A week later, DCist’s Elliot Williams got a hold of an email that City Winery CEO Michael Dorf sent to his partners and musicians saying that he tried to be part of the “resurgence of Ivy City.” But “we need to be responsible to our staff, customers and many musicians regarding their safety,” Dorf wrote. “It is difficult enough operating a cultural facility in challenging economic environment, [sic] but when the neighborhood puts so many at risk, it makes it impossible to operate.”

The reaction from some has been less than sympathetic to Dorf’s plight. J. Peter Loftus, the general manager of nearby Ivy City Smokehouse, tweeted that his restaurant has “been through far, far worse than the issues Mr. Dorf used as a cop out. … They had no community outreach with the residents of Ivy City and failed due to their own negligence,” he wrote.

Answering questions by phone and email, Dorf defends his comments that some have suggested are a coded description of the historically Black neighborhood.

“Absolutely the furthest from the truth. It is not code. It is referring to the actual … two-block radius around us,” Dorf tells City Paper via email. “We embraced the community. Most of our performers, staff, management, local partners are Black. I am Jewish and very sensitive to any kind of racial innuendo. Leaving the area is about losing millions a year, period. But the crime and daily break-ins makes it unsustainable.”

Dorf, who is originally from Milwaukee, established himself in the music world in 1986 when he opened the Knitting Factory, a jazz and rock club in New York City. In 2008, he opened his first City Winery in Manhattan. The venue chain’s location in D.C.’s Ivy City neighborhood, with its tables-and-chairs audience set-up, regularly featured neo-soul, jazz fusion, gospel, go-go, singer-songwriters, and occasional rock and African shows. It opened in 2018 at the site of the former Dream and Love nightclubs. Today, Dorf’s City Winery chain has 12 locations in eight cities, including Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta.

“A lot of our programming in D.C., Chicago, and Atlanta is very R&B oriented,” he says in a phone interview. “We’re a pretty woke, cool music company and that is part of why I wanted to be in Ivy City. To me that was an appeal. So this has nothing to do with race and zero to do with the affluence of a particular neighborhood at all. It has to do with violence and safety to our people that I have a responsibility to take care of—my team, the public, musicians, we have a lot of stakeholders that I need to be cognizant of.”

As an example of the sort of issues he’s dealt with, Dorf says a member of his staff was “violently attacked by some homeless on the corner coming to work” two weeks ago. “We have had staff members attacked leaving work at night. We don’t have money to continue to pay security to escort staff back to their cars every night,” he adds. 

Dorf says bands have had their vans broken into, and a couple attending a daytime wedding food tasting had their car broken into. 

“We had multiple agents and managers who said they will play any City Winery, but they say, ‘We won’t play D.C. because the band doesn’t want to leave their van in the protected alley or in front of the club because they don’t feel safe,’” he says.

He also cites voicemail messages from customers about parking and safety, and notes that the venue had a high turnover of staff because of such issues. 

Throughout our conversation, Dorf focused on the nearby New York Avenue Men’s Shelter, which is open for people to stay at from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m.

“I would say about 75 percent of the time [the police] show up pretty quickly when called,” Dorf says. “The problem is you can’t call them three or four times a night just because there’s some intimidating, potentially violent homeless on the street that are at the homeless shelter right next door. That is the biggest and toughest challenge for any city. Homeless resources are tightened up since the pandemic, and, for us, it got to a position where things were untenable.” 

Dorf says there is a “fine line … regarding what the police should do” regarding people experiencing homelessness. He did not elaborate on how he knows that a person is “intimidating” and “potentially violent.” 

Despite the effect Dorf believes the shelter has had on his business, Dorf says he’s raised the issue to his landlord, Douglas Development, but never spoke with the director of the shelter or with the D.C. Department of Human Services. Two members of his staff, however, did speak “several times” with staff in the Office of Nightlife and Culture. Neither DHS, nor the nightlife and culture office responded to City Paper’s request for comment by press time.

Dorf says that early in the venue’s four-year stint on Okie Street NE, “we organized the local community via two meetings at City Winery with local businesses, about half of which are not around anymore. …We had a representative from Douglas development who owns all of the properties and a member of the police department.”

Dorf says he appreciates the development firm’s investments in the neighborhood, but believes they didn’t deliver on promises they made that convinced him to set up shop in the first place.

“I don’t want to throw them fully under the bus, as the situation is not all the creation of, or the problem of Douglas Development,” he says. “What was promised got pretty derailed by the pandemic. That is certainly no fault of anybody’s. There were many more restaurants there when we came in 2018, and there was a presentation by the real estate community and the brokers and agents that brought us to the neighborhood that there was going to be many more restaurants coming in.” 

He says Douglas Development pitched the area to him as the “next Union Market.” 

“It’s well below the mark of what was supposed to blossom in the neighborhood,” he says.

In response, Norman Jemal, managing principal at Douglas Development, says via email: “It is an interesting prospective that Michael has ….many are successful and thriving—part of being an ‘owner’ is accepting responsibility and not making excuses, maybe it’s best michael do some soul searching and drill down on his business!”

Not everyone views the area the same as Dorf, and some think the issues are not so simple.  

Parisa Norouzi, the executive director of Empower DC, tells City Paper in an email that “City Winery wanted to benefit from gentrification and failed to understand its destiny is actually tied to those who are being harmed and left behind. 

“A safe community is one in which basic human needs are being met….City Winery could have been part of the effort to restore Crummell School into a park and community center, and create job opportunities,” Norouzi continues. “Instead they wanted to drop in, make money, and not have to think about or contribute to the community’s well being. We invite them to stay and join us in fighting for changes that benefit everyone—not just their own bottom line.”

April Goggans of Black Lives Matter DC says via email that “blaming ‘the city’ for not creating [Okie Street as] a ‘safer Union Market’ is code for helping to raise property values in a city with the highest intensity of gentrification of any U.S. city.”  

Sebrena Rhodes, the advisory neighborhood commissioner for Ivy City (who also works for Empower DC), is disappointed with Dorf’s generalizations regarding people experiencing homelessness in the neighborhood and asserts that he is not doing enough to help.

Dorf says City Winery DC lost close to $2 million in 2022, and that the business lost more than $1 million in 2019 and 2018, respectively. He was able to secure Paycheck Protection Program loans during the pandemic when the venue was closed, but says those loans can’t be forgiven.

“We did get some Shuttered Venue [Operators] Grants money and that certainly helped getting the landlord paid for the months that we were closed and for paying other out of pocket costs,” he says. “But net, we are definitely in the hole.” 

While Dorf believes many of City Winery’s problems stem from crime, there are certainly plenty of other complaints from his patrons. The venue’s lack of  proximity to a Metro station and lack of substantial parking don’t help.

And by some accounts, marketing for shows needed improvement. Local music critic Ahmad Zaghal tweeted that New Zealand rock band The Chills, who played a City Winery show, would have had better attendance at the Black Cat. “A handful of people who ordinarily would’ve been on top of something like that had no idea it was happening when I told them I was going,” he said in a tweet.

The venue ended up selling tickets for the Chills—and another show featuring Malian musician Habib Koité—on the half-price Goldstar website when they realized they hadn’t sold enough.

Dorf says it’s difficult to know how many tickets a particular band will sell in a given market.

“It’s not a perfect science,” he says, insisting that “we are very good at what we do.” Dorf says they tried to address the parking issue by using a lot two blocks away, but says people felt uncomfortable making the walk.

Rhodes, the ANC, is hoping that the $20 million allocated by the D.C. government in 2021 to turn the abandoned Crummell School into a community center will be helpful to kids and unhoused people in the neighborhood as well as other D.C. residents. But Dorf is moving. He’s hoping to find a different location for a D.C. area City Winery, but he notes it may take some time. Beginning in January, five full-time employees from the Okie Street NE location will start working at other City Winerys throughout the country. Dorf says he has offered jobs to the remaining 95 employees at his other locations if they wish to relocate. 

“No pun intended, the building and the neighborhood needed some love,” he says of the soon-to-be closed northeast venue with a reference to the shuttered nightclub that used to occupy the space. “And we were there ready and able and wanting to do it. But between the pandemic and very challenging effects to the neighborhood and a lack of commitment from the developer that didn’t happen. It might be five to 10 years before that happens. But we don’t own the building. We’re just a tenant who couldn’t afford to stay.”

This article has been updated with comment from Norman Jemal.