Happy-hour at the the Feve, a long standing tradition for those Oberlin students of legal drinking age, will now face new limitations on crowd size due to concerns over building capacity and fire safety regulations. From now on, no more than 40 people will be allowed in the upstairs bar on Friday afternoons.
“The Oberlin Fire Chief stopped by last Thursday,” Feve owner Jason Adelman said, “and told us, ‘If we come in and you’re over capacity, we’ll have problems.’ And that’s the last thing I want, to have problems.
“Happy-hour is the only time when it is over capacity, and it is definitely over capacity,” Adelman continued. “That’s one thing I know I can change. Other than that, we’re never really over capacity.”
Oberlin Fire Chief Dennis Kirin stressed that the Feve is not being singled out for special treatment.
“We’ve been to other restaurants,” he said. “We’ve been to public spaces on campus, we’ve been to the ‘Sco and we’re making arrangements to get up to the Cat in the Cream. Assembly areas are always subject to fire inspections to determine that they are not over-occupied….We’ve been coming by just to remind them they’re subject to inspections during business hours.”
Fire departments across the country are stepping up efforts to enforce fire safety, Kirin explained. “I would have to allude a little bit to the Rhode Island incident,” he said, in reference to the recent nightclub fire that claimed almost 100 lives. “Fire departments are getting a little more active. The inspectors say to themselves, ‘well, maybe I really ought to go take an extra look, so that nobody gets hurt when they go out to have a good time.’”