Trouble bubbling again at former Fizzary location?

The alleged Mission Street gambling den that Capp Street Crap reported on extensively last year appears to have returned.

According to a Mission Local article that cites unnamed neighbors, the same gambling operation that ran out of the former site of The Fizzary soda shop at 2949 Mission St. is back and using the Lilac Street-facing portion of the building for all-night parties. From the article:

Parked cars clog the narrow Lilac Alley that runs behind the building, their occupants entering and leaving the den to gamble, play pool, drink, and solicit prostitutes. The parties generally begin after midnight on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The activity keeps some neighbors up until dawn.

“There’s been fights in the back alley, people urinating, vomiting,” said one neighbor. “There’s no parking in the back alley. All these people park back there, honking all night long and it’s hard to sleep.”

Vacant for months with a “for lease” sign out front, 2949 Mission St. was the subject of complaints throughout fall 2015 after former Fizzary owner Taylor Peck said he unwittingly subleased to a couple who claimed to want space to run their vitamin business. There was a shooting at the former Fizzary, multiple police raids at the Mission Street property, and the situation got so tense that Peck ultimately vandalized the front of the building in hopes of forcing authorities to do something about the problems inside. Peck was evicted and the subtenants forced out in January.

Mission Local’s recent article also quoted a neighbor who believed the operation had relocated to Capp Street before returning to its old location.

Back in May, several Mission neighbors told me a gambling operation did in fact appear to be going on in a warehouse near 23rd and Capp streets. One woman told me that two months prior, she saw what looked like gambling machines being hauled into the warehouse and that a neighbor told her it was the same people associated with the problems at The Fizzary.

The woman, who didn’t want to give her name, said that noise had not been an issue, but that people often stood outside the warehouse door late at night calling on their cellphones to be let in. Two security cameras had recently been installed near the warehouse’s entrance.

I attempted to talk to a woman waiting outside the building one afternoon but she ignored me, and ultimately turned her back on me. I left my phone number with a woman who eventually opened the door to let her in, but received no response.

I’ve spoken to the woman since and she told me that whoever was using the warehouse appeared to have left.

Now in Los Angeles, Peck expressed amazement that the problems have returned.

“My thoughts go out to the neighbors… Great folks that shouldn’t need to tolerate this,” he wrote in an email. “A lesson in neighbor unity and rallying for a common cause…we tried and felt fairly isolated in our pursuits.”

[Photo by Eric D]