Who filed more than a dozen complaints with New York City’s buildings department against the venerated Greenpoint bar and metal music venue Saint Vitus?
That’s the burning question swirling within the city’s metal music scene after the venue closed on Friday due to building violations, which include a certificate of occupancy that doesn’t match a bar that serves food and drink and can, on some nights, fill with several hundreds of people. Dave Castillo, a booker and co-owner of Saint Vitus, told Gothamist that staff are working to reopen, though it’s unclear when that will happen.
“Now that city business is back online, we’ve been working to see how we can best move forward,” he said.
The venue has the support of councilmembers like Lincoln Restler, Justin Brannan and Keith Powers. Neither Brannan nor Powers represent the neighborhood, but Brannan plays guitar in a punk band that has themselves performed at Saint Vitus.
“I heard about it right away,” Brannan said, “It came across the underground wire.”
Castillo said he wasn’t ready to speak about the complainant or their discussions with the agency. But social media was abuzz with speculation on Tuesday.
“Getting extreme ‘moved into the neighborhood and got mad’ vibes off of this,” X user @coopercooperco said of the mystery complainant.
Here’s what we do know:
Starting in 2017, complaints about the certificate of occupancy began to trickle into the city’s buildings department, records show. Then, over May and June of 2023, the city received more than a dozen nearly identical complaints, some submitted just a day apart. Most used almost identical language.
Each complaint alleges a lack of maximum occupancy signs, an inappropriate certificate of occupancy and a missing Public Assembly Certificate of Operation. Then, a threat: “I will continue to make this complaint on a daily basis until either the Department of Buildings performs an inspection or until Saint Vitus Bar can remedy…
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