The promotional materials boasted it as ‘Tucson’s Biggest Party,’ and last Friday’s #FridayThe15th blowout at the Seasons Apartments near 1st Avenue and Wetmore was well on its way to living up to that hype.
That is, until some late-arriving but still overly eager partygoers started doing a really bad interpretation of storming the gates of paradise and ruined the fun for everyone else.
Tucson police estimate about 2,000 people were crowded around the pool at Seasons when, after discussions between a fire marshal and Seasons management, the gates to the pool area were locked to keep things from getting even more packed.
“Then people started climbing the gates to get in,” Tucson Police Department spokesman Sgt. Chris Widmer said. “It was actually the manager that shut the music down.”
#FridayThe15th was broken up around 11 p.m. Friday, Widmer said.
While the majority of posts on the party’s Facebook event page seemed to blame the cops for being buzzkills, Seasons manager Megan Brown said it was all her call. It was just a matter of safety that prompted the party to get shut down early, she said.
“It was insane,” Brown said. “It was amazing, people were having a great time. We just didn’t have the space for all those people. The amount of people that came was overwhelming.”
Though the pool area was only supposed to hold about 1,000 people, it was expected the party would have been able to continue had the gate-climbing not occurred.
“I don’t think we would have stopped it unless we’d received complaints of disturbances, which I can’t imagine wouldn’t have happened,” Widmer said of the party, which was scheduled to have DJs spinning past 2 a.m.
However, only one noise complaint was called in, Widmer said. That came in at 11:15 p.m., as the party patrons were being dispersed by officers from three patrol divisions. TPD also had air support and K-9 units in the area in case things devolved into madness, as they did last month when shots were fired in the parking lot of a similarly large party at the Stone Avenue Standard complex.
Widmer said that, despite the large police presence, no force was used in dispersing the crowd. And only one arrest came of the whole night, a single marijuana possession charge.
And though some post-party Facebook comments would suggest otherwise — our favorite: ‘Whoever took my car keys, consider yourself shot and dead’ — it sounds like #FridayThe15th was considered a success, albeit a short-lived one.
Brown, for one, expects an upswing in leasing inquiries to come from it.
“I think we’ll definitely see some positive … renters from it,” she said. “That was the talk.”
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2013.
One small step the U of A could take toward mitigating this problem would be to expand its Student Code of Conduct to include undergrad compounds such as these. This wouldn’t make this sort of problem go away, but it would incentivize responsible behavior in this new category of off-campus party destination local political and media establishments euphemistically call “student housing.”
First article I’ve read from Brian that isn’t obnoxious and immature, but rather actual reporting. Great job, Brian.
“And only one arrest came of the whole night, a single marijuana possession charge.”
Hellyeah baby! My tax dollars at work!
@timswayton: Sorry to have let you down … with this piece. Will be extra obnoxious and immature next time around to make up for it.
Correction there was no conversations between the Manager and the Fire Marshal or Fire Dept.
@FireMrsh: I’ll make sure to tell the TPD spokesman they were incorrect.
Really? All that underage drinking and only one arrest was made? At one point there were at least 40 cops gathered in the Best Buy parking lot waiting to move in. And with all of that presence only one arrest? All those kids drinking and piling into their cars parked at Best Buy, Sprouts, and other neighboring business and none of them were driving intoxicated? Why am I finding this very hard to believe?
Seriously? Were these kids all raised in a parking lot by wolves?? When a “party” that isn’t appropriately monitored/guarded by paid security personnel, and it gets out of hand and TPD is called, and there is ONE ARREST??
1) There was room for 1 thousand people but 2 thousand showed up and were climbing over the fences
2) The FD was there, speaking with the management, but so what?
3) The manager didn’t think there’d be any problem with the neighbors even though the DJ’s were supposed to be spinning until 2 am?
How in God’s name wouldn’t this be a problem for the entire apartment area much less a 1 mile circumference in terms of loud, obnoxious noise until the wee hours of the morning and the traffic involved with people coming and going to this “party.”
Why didn’t TPD simply bring in a very large cadre of patrol officers, and take everyone to jail and/or cite them for underage drinking, disorderly conduct, peeing in public, etc.
You don’t get the attention of rude, entitled people until you hit them hard in their, or their daddy’s wallets. A series of citations for drunk and stupid would shut down a lot of this behavior. Come on TPD and University Police…..enough is enough.
I’m sure that the new Cadence student housing currently taking applications will really bring a great “vibe” to downtown Tucson. Drunk-ass students of privilege, puking on the sidewalks, what a great promotion for downtown!
The U of A.. Where us “drunk-ass students” who are just such an inconvenience and eye sore to you and your precious downtown which by the way has no aesthetics, nothing eye capturing, oh and a useless piece of red “art” sitting infront of your public library; attend is pretty much the reason your little insignificant town of tucson exists so if the students go.. Where does that leave you smartass.