After the Hudson Lounge incident, one other bar was cited more than any others by commenters on the various Houston Press blogs about the situation: Sawyer Park. The Washington Avenue sports bar, they claim, is both stricter and more racially suspect in applying its dress code, often excluding members of large parties who were not completely in compliance — and most of whom just happened to be African-American males.
Ray Odom, as it turns out, has a Sawyer Park story too: One of his friends was denied entry because his shoelaces were untied.
Marco Torres
Years of experience as a party and event planner has not kept Imani Rose from feeling the sting of discrimination at Houston nightclubs such as Roosevelt Lounge.
Marco Torres
Ray Odom outside Hudson Lounge, where he says the flood of negative feedback on social-media sites like Yelp following his Hydeout at Hudson party has "ruined" the Rice Village bar's reputation.
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"We were dressed pretty preppy that night, wearing sweaters," says Odom, explaining that his party chose to take their business elsewhere rather than try to get back in once his friend's shoes were tied.
"My friend was wearing Timberlands, but they were the boot type, more like the Sperry-type slip-ons," he adds. "The bouncer swore up and down that it had nothing to do with an urban quota."
Sawyer's events manager, Erin Collins, contends the bar is just looking out for its customers, specifically the female ones.
"We had females in the bar who felt uncomfortable about men who were dressed a certain way," she says. "We don't want people to look like they just came from the gym or just got done running at Memorial Park. We are basically looking for upscale casual wear — no cutoff jean shorts, sleeveless shirts or tank tops. We do allow sandals and [hemmed] shorts, though."
The Houston Press talked to one man — a nightclub consultant, bouncer and doorman for the past 12 years who requested his name not be used — who told us flat-out that, especially at more upscale venues, club owners and managers will tell their door people to only let a certain number of a given race inside; and furthermore, that "everyone does it."
However, he said that cloaking discrimination inside a dress code is not the way to go about it, because too often it leads to situations like those encountered by Dewalt, the DJ who was denied entry into the club where he was supposed to be playing that night, and Ray Odom's friend: Someone who has been turned away inevitably sees someone else dressed exactly like them already inside and calls bullshit. Loudly and publicly.
Other doormen, like Anthony Gassnola, question the need for a dress code at all. Gassnola, who worked at Christian's Tailgate in Midtown and now checks IDs at Montrose hipster hub Poison Girl, says years of breaking up random fights have taught him that suit-clad investment bankers can be just as unruly and disagreeable as surly-looking indie-rockers sporting neck tattoos.
"I think the whole idea of a dress code is pretty dumb," Gassnola says. "Just because you dress nice, you are not necessarily a better person than those people in T-shirts. You can dress up a turd, but it's still a turd."
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Two of the three Houston Press reporters assigned to this story, Craig Hlavaty and Shea Serrano, visited Hudson Lounge on separate nights the week of January 24. Their only instructions were to act like regular customers, observe their surroundings, and see if they could discern any evidence of discrimination, racial or otherwise.
Hlavaty, who is half Czech-American and half Hispanic, had never been to Hudson before. He wore jeans, dress shoes and a long-sleeve henley (a shirt with buttons and no collar) to cover his tattoos, and left his wallet chain and pocketknife in his car.
No doorman was on duty that night, and although small, the crowd was racially mixed. A Hispanic couple sat next to Hlavaty at the bar, while two African-American men relaxed over beers off to the side. A pair of tall, older white women came in giggling, while a few younger waitresses killed time talking about their vacation plans.
"It just felt like the Houston we all live in every day," Hlavaty says. "Whether or not something had changed in the past month and a half I can't rightfully say."
Serrano, who is Mexican-American, profiled Hudson Lounge in his Nightfly column about two weeks before the events of December 28 ("Sleek Chic," December 16, 2010). "Save one or two guys with haircuts like Christian Bale in American Psycho, Hudson actually feels warm and inviting," he wrote.
Serrano and his wife Larami drove by the bar early in the week, but didn't go inside because they didn't see a doorman. They returned after midnight on an evening the club was full. Dressed in a peacoat, undershirt, khakis and soft-soled shoes, Serrano was not allowed inside. He says the doorman, who was respectful, told him he could come in if he returned in a collared shirt and dress shoes in accordance with Hudson's "smart" dress code.
His wife, an African American dressed that night in a low-cut blouse, dressy blue jeans and brown boots, got into the club "with no problem," Serrano says. Inside, from what he could see, the crowd was mostly white with a few black and Hispanic-looking men scattered throughout.
"Most everyone was dressed nicely, but several men did have on soft-soled shoes and collarless shirts," Serrano says.
