Closed Quarters? Playland Arcade Faces Shorter Hours

By Josh Grossberg

A quarter here, a quarter there and pretty soon, you're talking real money.

And if the Santa Monica Planning Commission votes on Wednesday to make the Pier's Playland Arcade close its doors at 10 p.m. instead of 2 a.m., the landmark attraction could lose a lot more than quarters - it could close its doors forever, said co-owner Joanie Gordon.

"If we are forced to close earlier, it will affect us incredibly," said Gordon, whose family has operated the Playland Arcade for half a century. "A great deal of business is done at those late hours."

Even though the arcade owners have had the option of staying open until 2 a.m. as long as anybody can remember, a forgotten - and recently remembered - city ordinance enacted in 1988 mandates that arcades close four hours earlier. The lost law was found when pier neighbor, the ailing Pacific Park, recently sought permission to extend its hours.

The Playland owners are hoping the Commission will grant them a variance and allow them to stay open longer. Gordon estimates that 20 percent of the arcades business drops into machines during those last four hours.

"These are the hours we've always had," Gordon said. "In fact, our 1990 lease, which makes no reference to closing, is written with reference to minimum hours. They wanted to make certain we'd remain open for a certain amount of hours."

Indeed, late one warm summer night, the arcade was hopping. The whirring and buzzing of the latest video games filled the air and the clanging of pinball machines blended with the laughter and chatter of patrons who dropped coin after coin into little silver slots.

If the Planning Commission accepts city staff's recommendations, these video enthusiasts will have to find somewhere else to play. And many nearby residents couldn't be happier. Neighbor activist Ellen Brennan said that while the arcade attracts mostly law-abiding citizens, it also brings the wrong crowd into the neighborhood.

"There are a lot of kids having a good time, but if you go on a winter night, the gangs are in the arcade," she said. "After they leave, they hang out in the neighborhood."

Brennan said problems include noise, graffiti and vandalism in the early hours of the morning.

The Santa Monica Police Department seems to agree.

"The Playland Arcade is responsible for a significant number of police calls compared to other businesses on the Pier," according to the staff report. "Most of the arcade-related incidents occur after midnight when Pier patrons shift from families and general-age population to adolescent and young adult."

However, both Gordon and Jan Palchikoff, executive director of the Pier Restoration Corp., said it's impossible to determine whether neighborhood troublemakers are coming from Arcade or someplace else. The PRC recently voted unanimously to endorse the arcade's extended hours.

"Everyone has heard these complaints," Palchikoff said. "But they can't be connected to any one activity. We've got a wide-open boardwalk. People get there from a lot of means and can go anywhere they want."

Palchikoff bristles at the suggestion that people can easily be identified as gang members.

"How do you know who anybody is?" she said. "That's a huge assumption to make. People come in all shapes and sizes and it says nothing about what they do."

Gordon said that people may mistakenly think the arcade is trying to squeeze more business hours out of the day. But that's not the case, she said.

"To the person who doesn't understand, it looks like we're trying to get extended hours," she said. "We're just trying to keep the hours we always had."

Shortened hours will also hurt the city, Gordon said.

"If you get out of a movie on Third Street and say, 'Hey, let's go to the pier,' and the only thing open are three bars, people won't come," she said. "It will have a domino effect. The ironic thing is we are a family-based amusement and are being told to close, but three bars are being allowed to stay open."

Brennan said the arcade may have always stayed open later, but the type of crowd has changed over the years. While the arcade was once filled with simple mechanical devices -- pinball machines and nickelodeons -- the explosion of often violent video games in the 1980s has attracted a more violent crowd.

"While they have a tradition, it's because of the changes in the industry that they have to be regulated," she said.

But Gordon said that most of her late-night business comes from well-behaved people in their 20s and early 30s, people who may not even leave their house until 9 or 10 p.m.

"This is not the Oregon coast or even Malibu," she said. "It's an amusement center. And it has been for my whole life."