Entering the Zone

The day of our appeal hearing in front of the Zoning Hearing Board in April, 2003, my friendly volunteer advisors, Peg and Tom, came over to the house to help me strategize. Ideally we would have liked the ZHB to overturn the cease and desist order, but we also recognized that this was not likely given the problems with the way the ordinance was written. So the real strategy was to make sure that we got the ZHB to state clearly the basis for the C&D order. It was impossible to tell from the original document exactly what it was that we were doing that constituted a violation of the zoning ordinance. Was it the parties themselves? Was it that these events were "commercial activity"? And if our parties were "commercial activity" what made them such? Would it be possible to hold a house concert party that would not be viewed as a violation of the zoning ordinance? All of these issues needed to be clarified.

The other piece of our strategy was to make clear that we would view any attempt to enforce the C&D order as a violation of our rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the US Constitution. So Peg and Tom helped me craft a statement to the effect that we believed that the order violated our civil rights under the Constitution and that if the ZHB left it in place and the Township chose to enforce it, we would take action to defend those rights. I was instructed to make sure to read this statement into the record before the ZHB took a vote.

The hearing itself was interesting in the way that small town business proceedings are always interesting. The essence of the neighbors’ complaints was that our house concerts were commercial activity that was bringing dangerous strangers and too much traffic into the neighborhood. "Dangerous strangers?" That was an interesting concept. Certainly the people who were coming to our house were strangers to everyone else. But they weren't strangers to us, unless you count someone who we were meeting for the first time because they'd been brought along by someone who we'd invited. And I had to chuckle a bit sadly about the adjective "dangerous" applied to the doctors, lawyers, accountants, computer geeks, writers, teachers and friends of my daughters who tended to populate our parties.

I stood up and talked about what was actually happening in our living room. We were using an e-mail list, jointly maintained by myself and a friend who was hosting similar parties in nearby Mt. Lebanon, to issue invitations. We maintained the list together because we had many friends in common and didn't want them to be bothered with two or more copies of the same invitation -- before we merged our lists, Annie and I had been sending our invitations to each other and re-mailing them to our personal lists. Our merged list had about 400 names on it at the time, and either Annie or I knew everyone on the list by face and name. We always asked people to RSVP so that we'd know how many were coming and could buy food and supplies and set up chairs for the party. We did not do any other advertising. The article in the paper had been a happenstance thing -- the PG reporter was looking for interesting things happening in the area on Superbowl Sunday and a friend had passed along our e-mail about the upcoming "Avoid the Superbowl" party which happened to feature three interesting musicians who had been traveling together across the US doing "The Great American House Concert Tour." He asked for permission to print something about it, and I had given it to him with the proviso that he list "an undisclosed location in O'Hara Township" and our phone number rather than an address. I actually received only three calls as a result of that published item, and none of those who called ended up coming to the party. We did not sell tickets, but we did ask people to throw $10 per person into a basket to help pay for the music.

Others who spoke during the hearing were concerned that because our performers stayed overnight at our house it looked like we might be running a bed and breakfast in our home. We explained that it was true that performers stayed overnight, but since all but a very few who performed in our living room were friends I'd gotten to know well in my other life as a folk musician, we didn't understand why anyone in the neighborhood should have any concerns about us hosting them overnight. They may have been strangers to our neighbors, but they were definitely our friends and we were happy to put them up for a night and feed them. In fact, one of the main reasons we started hosting concerts was to give my musical friends and I an excuse to visit and hang out together in between bumping into each other at summer festivals and workshops. They were traveling, Pittsburgh was along the way, and being able to share their wonderful music with my friends when they stopped to visit was a big bonus and a lot of fun for all.

In response to a question about how I booked performers, I told how several weeks earlier I'd spent a week in a dulcimer workshop with Lorraine Lee Hammonds, a fabulous musician who is well known in the dulcimer world, but hardly at all outside of that small group. Since there were only 10 of us in Lorraine's class, we got to know each other pretty well, and while chatting with Lorraine later in the week I mentioned that if she ever was passing through Pittsburgh, she'd be welcome to stay over with me and do a house concert. We had exchanged contact info, and I fully expected that at some point she'd come to Pittsburgh and my friends would be able to hear the great music Lorraine makes. I concluded by pointing out that nearly all the performers in my living room were musical friends like Lorraine -- I'd played with them, gotten to know them pretty well, and felt comfortable enough with them that I would be happy to welcome them into my home.

The ZHB chairman decided at that point that it was time to take a vote, but it wasn't quite over yet. The ZHB's lawyer added that before they voted, the ZHB members needed to realize that this was not like a request for a zoning variance where they could allow the variance with modifications. They had to either vote to leave the cease and desist order in place or strike it down. He then went on to advise that he saw five things that we had been doing that were not commercial activity in and of themselves, but that he felt taken together indicated possible commercial activity. The five were:

1. Frequency: we had hosted a concert about once a month over the previous six months.
2. Traffic: 30-40 people at our parties meant a lot of cars parked in the street
3. Advertising: the web pages for the concert could be viewed as advertising
4. Publicity: the item in the Post Gazette could be viewed as publicity
5. Ticket sales: the lawyer stated that he could not believe that tossing money into the basket was voluntary, so we must be selling tickets

The lawyer then advised the ZHB to vote to uphold the cease and desist order. I asked for a moment to read my statement about the relationship between the C&D and our civil rights into the record, and did so. The ZHB then took a vote and decided to uphold the cease and desist order. What that meant was that we had to cease holding the house concerts as they were presently constituted.

More about what we did after that shortly.