The Struggle of the Savoy Tivoli
At 9 p.m. on a recent Friday at the Savoy Tivoli in North Beach, a band called the Aggressive Monks, illuminated by green and purple lights, launched into a cover of the Ramones. While about a dozen patrons nodded along, waiting for drinks at the bar, Brad Nofal, the venue’s sound engineer, zipped back and forth through the venue. With iPhone and iPad in hand, he compared the sound levels on an app with a decibel reader installed above the door, around the size of a neon exit sign – large enough for musicians playing at the opposite side of the room to see it.
Nofal’s task wasn’t only to make sure the singer’s microphone wasn’t drowning out the drums and the bass. He was fine-tuning the speakers to maximize the music while keeping the volume at bay. For the 120-year-old bar, located just steps north of the nightlife-centric intersection of Grant and Green streets, Nofal’s work is a matter of survival: The Savoy Tivoli is one of the most complained about establishments in the city, according to the Entertainment Commission, which regulates live music venues, with 50 noise complaints so far this year.
“With rock bands like this, it’s tough,” Nofal said as he fiddled with the controls on his iPad. His phone app read about 95 decibels, while the overhead monitor fluctuated from the low to high 90s. Neither sound measuring tool was perfectly accurate, he explained – and nothing compared to the expensive tool the city brings in when they respond to a noise complaint. But either way, both readings were above the city’s limit of 93, so Nofal kept adjusting.
The complaints have been pouring in ever since the bar reopened in late 2022 after a four-year hiatus during the pandemic and a city-mandated seismic retrofitting. But despite the volume of complaints, the bar may not really be the city’s loudest. Nearly every single one came from the same person, the Entertainment Commission confirmed.
Most come in between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. – although the bar opens as early as 9 a.m. – and reference loud music with the windows or curtains not being all the way shut. Some even scold inspectors for not coming in time.
On August 24, 2024 at 9:40 p.m.: “Loud live band, hopefully you will show up tonight vs. Monday night when they are closed.”
On December 20, at 11:40 p.m.: “Loud Music, if you show up before 11 pm. Or do you ever really show up??”
Tito Avila, the bar’s co-owner, said that the complaints come in nearly every time the bar has a live band, which is almost every weekend. And every time, the city has to send an inspector, though the Entertainment Commission said that inspectors sometimes visit “retroactively,” depending on when the complaint was lodged.
Out of the 50 complaints, the bar has only been issued a notice of violation twice, according to the Entertainment Commission, and has never been cited. The notices require the bar to increase their noise abatement practices, but do not carry a fine like a citation would. If the venue fails to do so repeatedly, the commission can suspend or revoke their entertainment permit – which could be a financial death sentence.
“It’s hard to imagine he has this much power,” Avila said of the complaining neighbor, “but he does.”
That the Savoy Tivoli would be locked in a battle with one neighbor – and the city forced to respond each time – is no surprise in San Francisco, where neighbors routinely wield power over the people around them through complaints and appeals to city agencies that delay everything from housing projects to simple home renovations, often leaving those on the receiving end feeling helpless.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has sought to ease the city’s notorious bureaucratic challenges for small businesses and homeowners, with one of his first reforms geared towards streamlining permits for entertainment and live music venues. But none of those changes can stop someone from repeatedly filing complaints.
Dylan Rice, a spokesperson for the Entertainment Commission, said it does not control or discourage people from filing multiple complaints about a single business. But he added it tries to take a balanced approach to situations like this through its “deprioritization process” which allows them to deprioritize sending inspectors to places that do get repeated complaints by one individual, like the Savoy Tivoli, but are found in compliance during multiple inspections over several months.
Avila said he’s tried everything to appease the complaining neighbor, who he said lives just up the street. (The Chronicle believes it has confirmed the neighbor’s identity and address, but is not naming him to protect his privacy). In addition to Nofal’s constant volume monitoring, the bar has a sound curtain behind its doors, which the bouncer or Nofal makes sure is shut tight after patrons walk in. They keep the windows closed, and there’s special material on the ceiling to absorb sound. And though the bar is permitted to have music until 2 a.m., live bands always stop at midnight, Avila said.
Taken together, Avila estimated the measures have cost $150,000 since the 2022 reopening. City law says the Entertainment Commission may require places of entertainment to be soundproofed to reduce noise for their neighbors, but it also requires the Commission to “balance all of the interests of the respective parties” and consider the “hardship” that would result from venues doing so. As of now, however, the city offers no programs or support to help venues with sound mitigation.
“The amount of money we’ve had to put into this is absurd,” Avila said – not to mention the stress, gesturing toward Nofal: “And Brad’s losing his hair!”
From the outside, it would seem that many of those mitigations are working. On a recent Friday night, several of the bars in the vicinity of the Savoy Tivoli were much louder from the street, with music floating through open windows and crowds spilling out onto the sidewalk. While the muffled thrum of the Aggressive Monk’s bass and drums could be heard across the street from the Savoy Tivoli, most of the sound stayed sealed behind the windows and sound curtains.
Inside, the decibel reader on the back of the room continued bouncing up and down in the 90s throughout the evening as the mixed-age crowd enjoyed covers of the Cranberries and Blink 182. Though the bar didn’t really fill up until around 11 p.m., the band stopped just after midnight with an encore of Green Day’s American Idiot.
This isn’t the first time the bar has run into trouble with complaining neighbors. In 2002, it was ordered shut when neighborhood group the Telegraph Hill Dwellers started a letter-writing campaign against it. The bar, they claimed, was interfering with the “quiet enjoyment” of their homes when rowdy patrons poured onto the street at 2 a.m. It was saved only when then-mayor Willie Brown stepped in.
“I’ve just been going cuckoo,” then-owner Claire Kozel told the Chronicle at the time. “They want it to be a quiet residential area, and it’s never been that way.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Avila, who now co-owns the bar with Kozel’s son. And in his 2024 application for the bar to be added to the city’s Legacy Business Registry, he highlighted the complaints as an ongoing challenge for bars like his, which he noted has “been around for longer than any nearby resident.”
“(Complainants) moved in knowing it was a place with noise, yet they create complaint campaigns in an effort to bend the will of the neighborhood to their design,” he wrote. “The current rules are such that one resident, through systematic complaining, can threaten the viability of Savoy Tivoli or any other legacy business that is a place of entertainment.”
Beyond the day-to-day headaches, what troubles Avila is that the Savoy Tivoli – the kind of venue that once hosted the actual Ramones – could be fundamentally changed by the complaints.
“This place has such a history,” he told the Chronicle. “We’re just stewards… we want this to be here for generations to come.”
