Tag: Michael Fichman

January 20, 2020

How 24HrPHL Is Moving the Needle for Philly’s Nightlife

In 2017, Michael Fichman, aka DJ Michael the Lion (formerly DJ Apt One), set out to champion Philly’s nightlife through 24HrPHL, a community engagement campaign aimed to foster change in how lawmakers and nightlifers deal with regulatory, economic and social issues.

The campaign was initially inspired the emergence of “Night Mayors” in cities like New York, Amsterdam, London, Paris and Berlin and made possible by the Knight Foundation’s Emerging City Champions Fellowship.

In a brief chat, Fichman updated us on where 24HrPHL stands today, emphasizing that the organization has no political ambitions, but instead is focused on community building, education and inclusion.

 

Indie-Life Mag (ILM): The last time we spoke you were in the explorative stages of 24HrPHL. How has the campaign evolved since? 

Michael Fichman (MF): Philadelphia has a history of dysfunction in how nightlife, arts and culture are treated as an industry and a community. There have been persistent issues affecting the nightlife community, ranging from city laws to code enforcement; issues that cause venues to be consistently in danger of closing or people leaving the city to pursue better creative opportunities elsewhere. These issues don’t really register much with the city or with the public-at-large, even though Philadelphia is widely considered a place that generates culture.

Using the fellowship, I began conducting interviews with community nightlife stakeholders to in Philadelphia to explore these issues. I also started a Facebook group that has since grown to about 400 members. We have used the group for discussions about issues the nightlife community deals with, and this, ultimately, has lead to meetings and panel discussions. 

For one panel, we invited Lutz Leichsenring, spokesman for the Berlin Club Commission. He presented the commission’s model, which is partly an activist organization, partly a trade organization, but in essence a collective of working groups for different projects. And that’s what we modeled 24HrPHL after. 

Through these conversations, we identified the issues that mattered most to us and figured out ways to apply ourselves to fix them. We decided that we were interested in not political advocacy per se, but in community engagement and providing informational resources. Now, there’s a core group of 24HrPHL members that have their specific kinds of projects they work on.

 

ILM: Sounds like you used that fellowship to find your niche in this new space. What are some of the projects, and who is behind them?

MF: Projects that I’ve been working on include mostly things that have to do with city planning, urban policy, transportation and doing survey research to figure out what issues are important to Philadelphians.

Right now, I am working with Lily Goodspeed, Sean Agnew and PennPraxis of UPenn’s Weitzman School of Design on finalizing and publishing our “Venue Playbook,” a guide to all of the steps one needs to take in order to open a venue with the highest level of assembly licensure in Philadelphia, and also a bunch of different alternatives. These resources are hard to find on the city’s websites and a lot of people come to ask us about how to open a venue. The guide should be completed in the next couple of months. 

Then we have a subgroup, spearheaded by Cristina Caudill, Kerri Hughes and L’Oreal McCollum that has worked with the city’s rape crisis center and professional sexual health educators on developing sexual assault, harassment identification and bystander intervention trainings for nightlife venues. Another subgroup, led by Michael Lasday and Allison Herens, is working with a team of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health on drug harm reduction which includes narcan trainings for venue staff. The group also provides venue staff with supplies, everything from narcan kits to condoms, to keep people safe. And then, there is a group dedicated to largely developing safer and more inclusive spaces by providing educational signage, gender neutral bathrooms to security training.

 

ILM: So in true DIY fashion, 24HrPHL members have been focusing more on what they can do from within the group than relying on the city and its elected officials to fix the issues that plague the nightlife community? 

MF: Right. There are things that are implicitly political about the issues that we’re involved in, but we are not banging the drum for specific policies the way that a lobbying group would. Still, one thing that’s very important to us is building good relationships with elected officials and non-elected officials of the various city departments. A lot of the hard work to be done in making a better city has to do with access to relevant policy makers and being able to translate what it is that’s important to us about music, community and the city at night.

 

ILM: What are some of your campaigns long-term goals? 

MF: A goal — and challenge — is ongoing community engagement. It would be great to continue to raise awareness and expand the realm of possibilities in terms of what people think that Philadelphia can be. There’s a lot of opportunity for improving the characteristics of creative spaces to be either, safer, more accommodating or more inclusive. I don’t think everybody feels like they can go anywhere in Philadelphia and feel like that place is for them. Be it because of a lack of wheelchair access, safe transportation from one place or another, or because they don’t feel like their identity or community is being respected or affirmed by the establishment and its people.

These issues are ongoing, as is the need for a culture shift for the city and the public to not just treat the nightlife community as a kind of nuisance or an economic afterthought. It will require more education and discussions to improve the communication between the city, the state of Pennsylvania and the nightlife arts and culture stakeholders.

 

If you want to get involved or stay up-to-date with 24HrPHL, visit the organization’s website or follow on Facebook or join their Facebook group.   

July 6, 2017

24HrPHL: Nightlife in the Broad Light of Day

Michael Fichman, aka DJ Apt One, aka Michael the Lion, arrives at the Indie-Life offices on a steamy June night clad in cut-off jeans and a t-shirt bearing an old Philly subway logo. “Sorry for the baby spit-up on my shoes,” he says.

Fichman’s style neatly sums up his life at the moment: a new dad, balancing his career as a DJ with freelance work to pay the bills—a man with big plans for his family and his community that reflect a deep commitment to both. He shrugs off any praise for this balancing act, saying, “It’s more like I’m juggling and I haven’t dropped anything yet.”

He’s here to talk about 24HrPHL, his latest project. “It’s a community engagement campaign that I’m trying to put together that explores the world of nightlife arts and culture,” he tells us. The mission is to bridge the gap between City Hall and the city’s nightlife denizens—a community of artists, venue owners, DJs and promoters whose days begin after dark. Fichman received an Emerging City Champions Fellowship to develop a series of public and private discussions that will tackle the thorny issues of nightlife culture in a city that is, as he says, “a daytime-focused organism.”

The brainstorming has already begun on Twitter and in a private Facebook group. Those online debates are in preparation for a series of private group meetings IRL, and eventually a public panel discussion. Fichman hopes that this open dialogue and the ideas it generates will lead to substantive change in how lawmakers and nightlifers deal with regulatory, economic, and social issues together.

Fichman sees the appeal of Philly’s nightlife arts and culture as a draw to young people coming to Philadelphia; it is part of the city’s broader revitalization of the past decade and a half. But there are some long-simmering beefs between the city’s music scene and the city government, police department, and licensing and inspection board. Those issues came to a head in January of 2016 with the introduction of Bill 160016, which would have required performers to register their personal information with the City Police, and nearly doubled the license application fees paid by venues. There was an immediate outcry from the Philadelphia music and nightlife community, and the bill was quickly scrapped. But for Fichman, the uproar sparked an idea. “It was just really, really impractical,” he says of the bill, “and would have been impossible [to] carry out. I just realized, ‘Oh, I don’t think they understand at all how this works.’” Indie-Life Media

And he is uniquely positioned to explain how it works. An internationally touring DJ who has developed his own record labels, Fichman has a devoted fan base and reputation as a connoisseur of classic Philly sound—blending funk, disco and soul into a vibrant mix of dance music.  He also has a Master’s degree in city planning from Penn. A dance party favorite by night, by day he conducts quantitative city planning research as a consultant. “At some point a bell went off,” he says. “This is the Venn diagram of the two things I know about. I thought I would try to be an advocate in this space because I’m able to fluidly use the dialect of both sides or understand some of the issues on both sides, and at least appear credible to both sides.” He pauses to glance down at his frayed cut-offs. “I might wear different pants though.”

The vision for 24HrPHL has global roots. Fichman is fascinated with the ways in which cities around the world have succeeded—or failed—to incorporate their own nightlife cultures into city life and law. He is particularly inspired by Amsterdam’s nacht burgemeester, or Night Mayor. Operating as an NGO and not as an extension of the official city government, he is “a sort of quasi-minister of nightlife arts and culture in Amsterdam,” a liaison between the town’s storied nightlife and its staid city council. It’s an idea that has found support in other cities as well: New York now has a Night Ambassador, and similar movements are happening in London, Berlin, and Paris. When the two men recently met they talked about “how there aren’t these quantitative dimensions of this world that we can really call upon to say, ‘Here’s why this matters in terms of economic impact, in terms of global competitiveness, how large the sector is, that it attracts the following kind of residents.’ You know, numbers.”

When asked if he could pick one thing that he hopes 24HrPHL can accomplish, he balks. “Can I pick three?” Drawing from the Facebook group’s conversations, he singles out the cost of liquor licenses, expanding late night transit services, and the “toxic relationship” between venue owners and the city’s Licensing and Inspection board. He adds diplomatically, “It would be better if everybody was mutually understanding and pulling in the same direction.”

“Discussions in this realm have been so messy for so long,” he says, “that I’m not sure we’ve ever pushed into the next realm as a city, beyond collectively complaining. Collectively complaining is certainly a useful step in this process, but moving to a more constructive set of behaviors is where I’d like to see it go.”

Indie-Life’s Rasheed Abdellah and Michael Fichman

This summer Fichman travels to Toronto for a four-day workshop as part of his fellowship, where he’ll refine his plans for the initiative and broaden his network of civic visionaries. Then 24HrPHL will begin planning for its first public panel, which he hopes to have in the fall. In the meantime, Michael the Lion is not neglecting his own music (or his fans). Soul Clap Records is releasing his self-titled EP, now available for pre-order, and on July 21st he’ll be promoting it with a spot date at Front St. Cafe.

When asked if he’s ever considered taking on the role of Philadelphia Night Mayor himself, Fichman just smiles enigmatically and replies: “No comment.”