DEVELOPING STORY Coyne, George and Danzey take issue with the city's chosen plan.

At 10:30 on the first balmy, stroll-around-in-the-outdoors Saturday night of the season in the Flats, you can park at a meter on Old River Road. A loudspeaker fills the Cuyahoga breeze with music, but nobody is dancing in the street. Stanchions guide a nonexistent queue outside Heaven and Earth, one of half a dozen clubs that keep the street's faint pulse beating. Heaven and Earth is the club that Mack built. Mack Danzey: born in Cleveland, raised near East 105th and St. Clair, worked the DJ circuit until he had enough money to buy his piece of the American Dream.

Inside his club the disco balls are spinning for all their Technicolor worth in the effort to make some excitement among the 40 or so that came out to party. There's no cover charge. The girl at the doors lays purple plastic Mardi Gras beads on the guests, and sells $3.50 Budweisers. The bartender says there are two birthdays on the schedule for the night, and things won't get busy 'til about 11:30.

All the clubs that remain open in the Flats — half a dozen or so — keep the lights on with a similar story: They do their business late, and they count the good nights that sustain them like landmarks. This is the story the media has told repeatedly since Tony George and a few other property owners began to stir up opposition to the Wolstein plan. Scott Wolstein's Flats East Bank Neighborhood project, announced last year as Jane Campbell's campaign was kicking into gear, can be summarized like this: The Flats is Dead. Long live the Flats. Now let's plow it all under and move on.

More specifically: Wolstein would bulldoze the space from Main Avenue north to the railroad tracks, and from the River uphill to West 9th Street, replacing the storied collection of old brick buildings and parking lots with 300 condos and 200,000 square feet of retail, including a grocery store and movie theater. Total cost: $230 million. Public subsidies would pay about one-third of the cost, including about $22 million from the City of Cleveland in the form of bonds, Core City funds, a tax-incremental financing package and utility work.

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority voted Friday to pursue eminent domain if necessary to help assemble property for the Wolstein plan. By the Port's figures, Wolstein has control of just 37 percent of the land he needs for the entire project.

As attorneys for property owners have noted, this is unlike the U.S. Supreme Court's Kelo v. New London Connecticut ruling, which upheld the use of eminent domain for private redevelopment — and indeed unlike most others — where a developer has acquired most of the property and only needs help with a few hold-outs. On behalf of the Wolstein plan, the Port Authority would pursue no less than 63 percent of the necessary land by waving the government hammer. But that's not the number Port Authority Executive Director John Loftus uses when he talks about it. He refers to the amount of land under control for the first phase, which is focused on Old River Road. Within that boundary, Wolstein controls just under two-thirds of what he says he needs.

George and other property owners have criticized Wolstein for failing to buy any property on the open market, even as other investors, like Vegas-based Mike Tricarichi, have completed deals. Tricarichi recently bought one riverfront parcel — the property once known as the Basement, appraised for Wolstein by Ritley for $660,000 — for the more likely price of $1.2 million. George knows sale prices like that build his argument and will help property owners get fair prices, even if they are sold by eminent domain.

Things don't look so rosy, though, for Danzey and other tenants who actually operate the clubs. They will be compensated according to the Port Authority's Uniform Relocation Procedure, a standard formula that's supposed to cover the cost of finding a comparable new venue and moving into it. In these cases it adds up to a total maximum of $30,000.

Beach Club owner Curtis Knowles says the Port's negotiating agent offered him a mixed bag of perks totaling about $20,000.

"I've been there 13 years," he says. "Revenues are about a half a million a year. They used to be about $1.5 million. Now they want to throw me in the street for $20,000. I'd love to move, but I need $300,000 to $400,000 to find another space and make it occupiable. And the worst problem is, I can't sell this."

Beach Club manager Jay Cvetovac says the media have asked him what he thinks of the Wolstein plan, hoping to hear him say it's a good deal for Cleveland. But when he tells them what he thinks, they turn off the camera. Cvetovac and several other club owners and managers say Wolstein has coveted the East Bank for years, and that he has driven the place down by keeping his buildings vacant, demolishing with neglect.

"You want to see where the Flats is blighted?" He says. "Come here. Look at this. It's all the buildings that Wolstein owns."

ON A WEEKDAY morning Tony George parks along the sidewalk in front of what used to be Fagan's. It feels like a cop show as he steps out of his silver SUV in a black suit, and more guys pull up in quick succession: Tom Coyne and their buddy from Vegas, Mike Tricarichi.

George asks if the assembled remember Fagan's, the Flagship of the Flats. He has negotiated for the rights to open a new restaurant with the old name there. Last week he brought drawings for a new Fagan's sign to the design review committee of Flats Oxbow, the neighborhood community development corporation, of which George and Wolstein are both members. The issue was tabled after a request for more detailed plans.

Coyne is a hired hand in the proceedings, but Tricarichi and George are unified by their stated interest in redeveloping the Flats as individual property owners. George says he and others have been hearing for years that the Wolstein Group would buy their property to redevelop it, and so some of them didn't seek tenants. That, he says, combined with Wolstein's disinterest in anything but redeveloping his own properties, is why the Flats is so empty these days. As George tells it, the lowball offers property owners got from the Port Authority earlier this year tell them the Port's commitment to the idea isn't serious enough to wait for. He says for one of his properties, the Port offered less than he owes the bank. So he's done waiting.

"I could bring back the Flats in nine months," George boasts, as if bringing 15,000 people to the same street in Cleveland was just a matter of opening the doors.

"Just give me the keys to those buildings."

He offers to buy out all Wolstein's property for the same per-foot price as he was offered on his own property. George talks about the mix and the magic of diverse clubs that re-settled the Flats a quarter century ago on the strength of cheap rent and rock 'n' roll. He blames the White administration for bullying clubs out of business with weekend evening health department board-up raids, and aggressive ticketing.

If only he were allowed to rebuild it, he says, the crowds would come back. As prospective tenants of the renaissance, he names two franchises he owns, Harry Buffalo and Slam Jams. He says others would flock to the prime location.

Tricarichi's property is just south of the Wolstein footprint, so he's not facing eminent domain. He plans to develop an entertainment venue though, and says he expects to have invested a million in the property before he's done. For now he won't elaborate on his plans beyond saying it will be an entertainment venue. His connection to Las Vegas begs the question, though, and when asked directly, he says his interests "absolutely" include bringing gambling to the East Bank.

Big remodeling is also underway at the Circus, now owned by Déjˆ Vu and licensed as Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. Tradesmen are hard at work on a $1.5 million renovation there. A new roof is complete. New walls have been framed. They're not talking to the media, but they don't look at all like they're planning to close up shop.

"This should be a Bourbon Street of the Midwest," George says.

BEACH CLUB OWNER Curtis Knowles says the Old River Road scene was once the second largest attraction in the state, behind only Cedar Point, with tens of thousands visiting every weekend. "My clientele came from Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, Columbus, and they stayed at hotels," he says. "It was a national attraction, and it didn't cost the city a thing."

He contrasts the Flats' evolution and heyday against the kind of development the city is considering now. He says the multiple owners of the properties and businesses created both synergy and a survival-of-the-fittest ethic.

"Like snowflakes in November," Knowles says. "The clubs would land one by one, many of them melting before they began to stick and build on each other."

But that happened when the Flats was a forgotten corner of the city, which enabled small entrepreneurs to take a risk. A quarter-century later, the site has been recognized as prime waterfront land, and prices have gone up.

Now, Knowles says, "The city seems to like the idea of whole developments all contrived at once."

Another voice advocating for more diverse ownership of whatever develops on the East Bank is Victor Shaia. Shaia bought the parking lot on the hillside north of Main Avenue and has a vision for it: 228 condos and 498 parking spots. He's even offered to build enough parking to lease 250 spaces to the Wolstein project. And it's not a Johnny-come-lately idea: Shaia has worked with the city to develop the property himself since conducting a redevelopment study, funded in part by the Cleveland Foundation, since 2003. His plan has been approved by Historic Warehouse District. But Wolstein wants that property, too, and so the Port includes it on the list threatened by eminent domain.

After taking the parking lot by eminent domain, Wolstein would replace it with ... a parking lot.

Shaia has asked to be excluded from the footprint of the project because he says his proposal for condos and parking complements the Wolstein plan. But neither Council nor the Port Authority will consider making piecemeal exceptions to what they've been presented.

Tom Newman, director of Flats Oxbow, is in the precarious position of staffing a community development corporation that has powerful members on both sides of the argument.

"Sometimes I feel like just saying, 'Let the games begin. I just want to be a spectator,'" Newman says.

He says eminent domain has been a topic of discussion among Flats Oxbow members for years. "Our mission and guidelines from 1990 state that one objective of the organization is to represent the interest of private property owners against the interest of the government, including the use of eminent domain. Now we have one member asking the government to use it against another. I don't know what I think about that."

A JOINT COMMITTEE meeting of City Council on Monday had something in common with similar proceedings in Lakewood a couple of years ago. Then as now, a developer looked to the government to assemble riverfront property via eminent domain in the name of condos and retail. Then as now, Adam Fishman and Randy Ruttenberg — then known as Centerpoint Properties, now as Fairmount Properties — partnered with a deep-pocketed developer. This time that's Wolstein. And then, too, as now, Nancy Lesic handled the PR for the development side. And Tony George once again sits on prime real estate. In that case, before his office and Harry Buffalo property reached the eminent domain stage, he and Fishman reached an agreement.

At Monday's meeting, George and other property owners and their representatives had about four minutes each to speak to council members about the prospect of being forced to sell what for many of them is the biggest asset they own.

Even George says the people getting the worst part of the deal are the tenants. For them, it's not a matter of selling the asset they've built. They're just out of business. When his turn came, Mack Danzey asked the council members to think about what it was like for him to face losing Heaven and Earth.

"I bought my club in 2001," Danzy told them. "I worked hard. But I watched Wolstein board up his buildings, blighting the neighborhood so I could not make money. Imagine growing up with nothing and working to have this, and then to be offered $20,000 to move and $10,000 to relocate. I sit before you as a small business owner."

When council got its turn, the strongest objections came from Fanny Lewis and Zachary Reed, who saw in Danzy's predicament a dream snatched away, a man who was ill-compensated by the system and a wealthy man's plan. Reed asked what provisions had been made to ensure that African Americans, women and other minorities got their share of jobs and opportunities out of the deal. Lewis began her comments by noting butterflies in her stomach because "when she hears the words 'eminent domain,' it makes [her] nervous."

"Eminent domain is a hammer," she said. "And no matter how you get hit with a hammer, it hurts."

When Lewis asked how Danzey was protected by the agreement, Loftus referred her to a page detailing the Uniform Relocation Plan.

"I see 14 lines," Lewis said. "Which one is he protected under?"

mgill@freetimes.com