Where’s the Fire?

In its nearly 100 years of existence, the Gaslighter Theater in Campbell has gone from holding sharecropper’s cash as a bank in the 1920s and showing movies during World War II to being a small-stage theater for vaudeville acts and an all-ages rock venue as recently as 2006. At that time, the white marble landmark, with thick columns bracketing the entrance, was closed temporarily so it could be refashioned as a lounge.

Five and a half years later, the Gaslighter remains dark. But there’s hope the theater could be resurrected in coming months if it can overcome the kind of obstacles that frequently crop up in small town development battles.

The South Bay nightclub veterans who operate of Sabor and Myth Taverna and Lounge in San Jose have been working to reopen the Gaslighter as a restaurant and bar called Dasha.  “It is my intention is to bring the Santana Row crowd back down to Campbell,” says Ray Shafazand of Melodann Inc., which has teamed up with property owner West Hall Properties, LLC to launch the project.

Holding up the potential migration of nightlife customers south on Winchester is a strict alcohol ordinance that Campbell imposed in 2009. The Downtown Alcohol Beverage Policy prohibits any new establishments from serving drinks after midnight. In October, the city’s Planning Commission unanimously opposed Melodann’s application for a conditional use permit (CUP) on the grounds that the application would violate the ordinance. Underlying the technical objections are some cultural issues related to just how stylish a downtown befits a town whose central district was not too long ago populated by prune packing warehouses.

“The applicant talked about comparing this club to a club in New York City,” planning commissioner Phil Reynolds reportedly said at the time of the CUP denial. “Campbell is not New York City. Campbell is Campbell.”

Several dozen community members speaking against the project at the commission meeting amplified the Our Town chorus. They used the investor group’s marketing materials, which promised a “Las Vegas-style” nightclub with an atmosphere resembling the club Tao in New York, as ammo.

“Probably, there could have been better examples,” admits Bill Gates, an attorney for Melodann, “but those are the ones they’ve used.”

The chorus of objections prompted Dasha to scale back its ambitious plans in the hope that an appeal with Campbell’s City Council, which will reconvene Jan. 3, will fall upon more receptive ears.

“That was our intention at the beginning—to get an extremely upscale venue there—but we’ve been beaten up so much we scaled it down to a regular upscale restaurant like Santana Row,” says Shafazand, noting that the club will now hold a maximum of 250 people.

What confounds Shafazand and others in his group is that plans for the club were unanimously approved in 2006—only at that time, the CUP request came from Nick D’Arpino, who was in the process of buying the property. A few years later, Campbell instituted its downtown beverage ordinance, after a noticeable uptick in the number of alcohol-related arrests.

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