‘Fixing Paceville’ means fixing ourselves

You’ve got to hand it to today’s teenagers, though. They have sure raised the bar on what constitutes ‘pandemonium’ on a night out in Paceville...

A couple of decades ago, what passed for a night of ‘madness and mayhem’ was limited mostly to lot of underage drinking (and puking) outside bars like ‘The Alley’ and ‘Footloose’… coupled with the occasional fist (and/or bottle) fight erupting here and there.

OK, OK, make that a regular fistfight, involving entire clans of testosterone-fuelled adolescents, breaking out with spectacular predictability every two hours or so. (So regular, in fact, that you could even set your watch by it…)

But still: when we talked about ‘setting the night on fire’, we didn’t mean it quite so… literally. And the most the Casualty Department ever got involved in back then was to stitch up the occasional gash, or pump out the occasional stomach. There were never any large-scale emergencies that I can recall… certainly not involving over 70 casualties, at least two of them critical.

And all along I used to think that today’s Paceville was ‘tame’, compared to the nocturnal excesses of yesteryear. Sheesh! I’ll learn to treat my youngers with more respect from now on…

And yet, last Saturday’s pandemonium also illustrates that in some ways, Paceville hasn’t changed at all. In other ways, it may have changed more than we bargained for. 

But let’s start with what caused the astonishing mishap. Personally, I think it’s very unfair to pin the blame (as some have done) on the glass banister abutting Plus One club’s entrance stairwell, for shattering precisely when it did. Glass banisters are generally designed only to look flash when illuminated by blue neon… not to withstand the pressure of a human pile-up involving hundreds of people. 

What really caused the accident, then, was that so many people tried stampeding through (apparently) only one, very narrow exit. So immediately, everyone wants to know whether there were any other emergency exits; and if so, whether they were functional at the time. 

Well, I can’t comment on the design of Plus One, because I’ve never been inside (nor even heard of the place before now). I have, however, often found myself in Paceville nightclub interiors… wondering what inevitable catastrophe might occur if, say, a fire broke out, or a bomb went off. 

Plus One is not exactly unique in this regard: and in a place like Paceville, where new bars and clubs seem to materialise from one visit to the next – often formed from the shell of a larger establishment, so that the new venues grow forever smaller and more crowded – it is debatable whether ‘emergency exits’ are in some cases even possible at all. 

Physical space is the issue most of the time. I’ve been to some bars (down the same flight of stairs leading to Bay Street) where the only entrance/exit possible is a small door up a narrow flight of steps. Just like Plus One, in fact. So the same sort of mass panic could conceivably break out in any one of those establishments, at any time. 

Like so many other things, this is just one other area where we’ve all secretly known we’ve had a problem for years…. and, just as secretly, kept hoping it would go away on its own. I put myself in the same category, by the way. All those misgivings I had about the lack of emergency exits in those bars? Never stopped me from having a drink in any of them. Like everyone else, I just kept my fingers crossed and hoped for the best…

It’s not just Paceville, either; nor even just bars and clubs. 

I recently had a conversation with a Neapolitan restaurateur down the road, and he professed astonishment at the fact that local authorities licensed his restaurant… given that its kitchen only has one entrance/exit. Back in Naples, he said, it would be impossible to get a licence. Here, it wasn’t even a consideration.

No offence to any Neapolitans reading this, but… that’s Naples he was talking about, folks. They might have invented the pizza, and tomato sauce in general (without which I would probably have died of starvation years ago)… but Neapolitans are not exactly known the world over for their superior health and safety standards in construction.

I suppose, then, that if a local restaurant’s entire cooking staff were to get incinerated in a kitchen fire, we’ll all suddenly awake to the fact that restaurants (and indeed buildings in many other categories) are routinely licensed without the most basic of safety features required by law. 

Same with Paceville clubs. They are all supposed to have emergency exits, according to the terms of their licences… but it’s only after 72 people get injured in a near-fatal crush that people remember such things as licence conditions exist.   

We ask other questions, too. Why were some of the casualties so young? Aged between 13 and 15? 

Yes, well, that’s a question I always ask on my increasingly rare visits to Paceville, accident or no accident. Walking down those aforementioned steps makes me feel like a genetically-engineered old fossil from ‘Geriatric Park’. Meanwhile, most of the ‘clubbers’ look like they just escaped from the nearest day-care centre. I’ve even seen some with satchels and lunchboxes…

Once again, it’s not as though the presence of underage teens in Paceville was never noticed before. This is just one other area where Paceville has not changed at all since its inception. Some clubs used to employ an age restriction in the past; but most did not, and teenagers as young as 13 thronged establishments such as the Ace of Clubs (underneath Paul’s Punch Bowl) in its heyday.

This in turn only highlights how Paceville has changed in other ways. The Ace of Clubs was actually a video arcade game-hall; as such, it catered specifically for young teenagers. And if there was a culture of allowing youngsters out in Paceville in the 1980s, it was partly because a chunk of the establishments back then were geared up for that age bracket anyway. 

Heck, there even used to be a mini-fun fair, featuring bumper cars, across the road from Wembley’s Garage…

Today’s Paceville, on the other hand, most emphatically does not cater for the young teenager at all. Saturday’s video subliminally underscores this point throughout: fixed to one side of the screen, almost like a station icon, was the black neon sign of the neighbouring club… ‘Steam’, one of a dozen “gentleman’s clubs” within a few paces of the same spot.

I have yet to meet a 13-year-old boy who could realistically be described as a ‘gentleman’… regardless how polished his manners. It’s the ‘man’ part that causes the problem here, not the ‘gentle’. 

And Paceville has become a place for men, not minors. You could almost say ‘men, not women’… but then again, it’s not just because of the sex industry. Even ‘regular’ clubs have broadly positioned themselves in the adult sector… wine bars, cocktail bars, exclusive clubs, VIP zones, ‘lounges’ with names like ‘Plush’, and so on. 

It’s a very conscious marketing decision taken by (let’s face it) the handful of entrepreneurs who actually operate most of the venues there; naturally, with the tacit approval of successive governments. Today, every aspect of Paceville’s outer (and, even more so, inner) identity practically screams out ’Adults Only!’ for all to hear. 

Yet even after midnight, the place is evidently still teeming with children, for all the world like a Luna Park on a public holiday. It’s like an experiment gone horribly wrong, whereby Paceville has evolved into some kind of hybrid monster: half strip club, half ice cream van.   

Meanwhile, you can agree or disagree all you like with the chosen strategy for Malta’s largest entertainment hub. I have no issue with it myself… provided the clientele actually matches the target market; and that other markets, including teenagers, are catered for elsewhere.

Problems inevitably arise, however, if Paceville continues to somehow lead this bizarre, Jekyll and Hyde existence. And some of these problems are of more direct relevance to Saturday’s accident than the age of the victims.

Let us, for argument’s sake, accept the marketing strategy currently in place for Paceville. Let us accept that it is an entertainment Mecca that aims to attract adults; and even then, adults of the wealthier, more ‘exclusive’ (whatever that means) variety.

If that’s the intention, we’ll have to provide clients with more than just dancing girls, expensive cocktails and cigar rooms. We’ll have to also provide the basic health and safety infrastructure one associates with high-end attractions – and indeed with all levels – anywhere in the world. 

But providing all this also implies changing our traditional (and entirely retroactive) approach from the bottom up. Details such as ‘emergency exits’ cannot be thought of only in response to the latest accident… age restrictions for clubs cannot be left at the discretion of nightclub owners, or simply ignored at will… and on it goes, an endless list of all the things we all know we have to one day address, yet never do. 

So before talking about ‘fixing the issues’ raised by Saturday’s accident… remember that fixing Paceville would require a complete and utter reboot of our entire national way of thinking on every level. 

Paceville is, after all, a construction of our own making. It cannot be other than a mirror image of ourselves, warts and all.