First the Pittsburgh Steelers lost the Super Bowl, and then the team’s local fans lost their game-day hangout in Hermosa, as Sharks Cove sports bar closed its doors after 17 years on Hermosa Avenue.
The establishment was more than just a home away from home for the black and gold, as patrons gathered around 67 TV screens, clacked balls around five pool and billiard tables, and shot the ocean breeze in the narrow patio out front.
As he cleaned out his office overlooking the bar’s darkened screens and silent pool tables, owner Shane McColgan mused on the long, happy run that he had with the place, and a rancorous ending that leaves him locked in litigation with his longtime landlord.
McColgan started off with a seven-year lease and then signed back-to-back five-year extensions. But then, he said, his landlord would keep him on only month-to-month, and would not sign him onto another lease.
McColgan said he asked to be allowed to sell the business to a new tenant she would approve, expecting to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the transaction. Instead, he said, she offered a more expensive lease to a new tenant, in a move McColgan described as unfairly taking from him his business, and its 17 years of good will, and selling it to another.
The landlord said McColgan’s charges were baseless.
McColgan said he had reworked the building, once a hardware store, into a more lucrative eating-and-drinking establishment, and steered the business through good times and bad, only to walk away with nothing but the state liquor license he holds.
“I said, please give me time to find a tenant you can approve,” McColgan said. “I brought a couple of prospective tenants and she shot them down.”
As a month-to-month tenant, he was left with no business to sell, he said.
“There is no value without a lease,” he said.
The landlord, Silvia Arnold, reached inChandler,Ariz., declined to speak in detail about the dispute, citing the ongoing legal action and a distaste for “discrediting people in the newspaper.” But she said McColgan’s charges were baseless.
“His business was not taken away from him,” she said. “All these accusations are written on the wind.
“I do not believe in discrediting people in the newspaper. I think it is rude and cruel. My opinion of him is not the highest, but I’m not going to say something about him in the paper. That will get him nowhere, nor me. I’m glad he is out, very glad”.Arnoldadded, “I don’t want to go through this nastiness in a little town.”
She described McColgan as a tenant who “wasn’t very cooperative.”
A phone call to new tenant Gary Alonso, who is set to open a business called Game Changers at the Sharks Cove location, ended right away when the line went dead, and a follow-up call was not returned.
Sharks Cove is among a number of beach cities businesses McColgan has opened since the mid-1980s, including Pulse Fitness, Iron Works gym with his brother Lance, Boxing Works with his brother Scott, and the eating and drinking establishments Your Place Café, Club Sushi with Scott and another partner, The Mix, 705, Sharks Cove in Manhattan Beach, and The Crest in Torrance.
“But I was able to raise my family – I have five children – on Sharks Cove,” McColgan said. “This has been my livelihood.”
Despite the sour ending, McColgan said running a sports bar inHermosa Beachwas a sweet experience, and expressed gratitude for his patrons and the city officials a businessperson must work with.
“We had a legacy here,” he said.
Looking ahead, McColgan co-owns the recently opened Hermosa Ink tattoo parlor, and has been talking about joining with the owners of Blue 32, also onHermosa Avenue, who lost their liquor license in a confusing receivership sale.
“They need a license and I need a location, so we’ve been talking,” McColgan said.
