Notice he didn’t say “and party till the break of dawn.”

These are tougher times for clubs in downtown Miami. A new day finds them stumbling blearily into the sunlight to discover that the alleged desirability factor they helped create is now rapidly reducing their cachet — at least as the city sees it.

In March, one megaclub’s owner and his general manager were unceremoniously arrested in the street for a noise violation. In June, another monster club got shut down through a combination of its own noisy hubris and a failure to pay bills. Even tony restaurant lounge Karu and Y had a run-in with the shushing brigade. Hard to believe it would come to this just a few years after the city of Miami created its first entertainment district, complete with 24-hour liquor licenses, along a desolate stretch of Northeast 11th Street.

If there’s anyone to thank (or curse, depending on perspective) for this turn of events, it is George “Not Missing” Link, a resident and assistant head of security of Park Place by the Bay, a 30-story apartment building located at 915 NW First Ave., an unfortunate two blocks from Club Space. Link is a character by anyone’s standard, a transplant from Manhattan who has made it his special mission to agitate public officials on behalf of fellow residents beleaguered by club row.

To this end, Link has written to nearly every level of government save the president. He faxed the governor, the mayor and the police chief, among others. For the most part, it did no good. Then he found an ally at the Venetia, located all the way up on 15th Street and across Biscayne Boulevard, beyond I-395 and the Carnival Center, where state-of-the-art sound systems still pumped into their bedroom windows.

Stacey Stokes, a 12-year resident and current vice president of the Venetia’s condo association, described the sensation as a year’s worth of “torture.” It was worse for residents on the highest levels of the building, where the sound waves were more intense. “I love to have my coffee on the terrace Sunday mornings,” she said. “It's like having a headache to hear that pounding.”

After feedback from other residents (even some at the Grand, a block north, complained), Stokes also made the rounds of public officials. For ammunition, she went to the police department and asked for all the noise complaints for 11th Street. She says she was told it would cost “something like $200” to get a printout of six months of complaints. If true, that’s clearly outrageous.

So Stokes drew up a petition and went over to Park Place to see if they would help her fight the noise. Link personally knocked on doors and garnered some 500 signatures. Stokes also got in touch with Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, who immediately put the heavy foot on city officials to do something.

But you know how government is. There are many different people interpreting an order and filtering that through whatever agenda they may have. Thus mistakes are made.

That was how Club Space owner Louis Puig ended up getting arrested on March 18 during the Winter Music Conference, along with Club Space’s general manager Markus Westreicher. One of Puig’s lawyers, former state prosecutor Alex Fox, described the situation as “an outrageous violation” of Puig’s and Westreicher’s rights, i.e., typical Miami cop overreaction to a situation that could have been handled in a much better way. “They arrested two guys for nothing and they sat in jail for eight to 10 hours,” he told me.

The arrest (as first reported by the SunPost’s debaucherous 411 celebrity columnist, Kris Conesa) caused quite a stir in clubland, with critics of the bombastic Puig cheering and fans of Club Space worrying that this represented the opening salvo of a “quality of life” war many had predicted once the condos started to rise in downtown. This sort of thing is old news on South Beach, but the clubs across the bay have enjoyed relatively free reign for several years.

Dan Vidal, operations manager/photo editor for nightlife Web site cooljunkie.com, posted a story about the arrest hours after it happened. He wrote that Nocturnal as well as Space had their outdoor sound systems shut down for noise complaints that night, and that possibly a couple of managers for the nearby Area 51/Allure/Adrenaline complex were arrested. Vidal is one of the more articulate denizens of nightlife and a veteran photographer of the scene. So I asked him: Does the city’s newfound interest in overgrown stereo systems bode ill for the future of nightlife in downtown Miami?

“The way things are going, what it really comes down to is that the condos are going to make life difficult for entertainment-oriented businesses in the area,” Vidal opined. “Noise violations will be the cover story, but realistically what it is going to be coming down to is that the condo-dwellers aren’t going to want ‘those people’ in the area once all the condos are done. Simply put, clubs like Space, Pawn Shop, Discotekka, etc., tend to cater to markets that aren’t the upscale VIP sort. Whereas the condo residents, if they go out to clubs at all, tend to go to [upscale] venues. ... So what I’m seeing here in the future is a microcosm of a class war.”

One reason the Club Space incident sent shock waves through clubland is that it is sort of the godfather club of the area. Open since 2000, Club Space has survived a move down the street, closing/opening parties, name changes, Puig’s various turf battles with other venues and promoters, lawsuits from patrons charging they were beaten up by bouncers, and a major drug bust in 2003, which netted nearly a dozen clubgoers and a couple of employees.

But Space is still popular with the dance crowd, most of whom are relatively harmless.

I've heard rumors that the Puig arrest on March 18 was in part motivated by a personal beef between Club Space and a police commander, but Puig wouldn’t return my phone or e-mail messages, and the commander in question recently retired, so who knows. But several people who either were present at the scene, or are close to Puig, told me the arrest wasn’t exactly textbook.

One source was Miami Police Officer Geovani Nunez, who was working off-duty security outside Club Space at the time of the arrest. Nunez told me he was working that night along with two other officers outside the club, mostly directing traffic. Other off-duty officers were stationed outside other clubs up and down the street. All was well until about 2:45 a.m., when Nunez noticed that Lt. Windsor Lozano was in the street, talking with Space GM Westreicher. Shortly, Puig showed up and the three conversed.

Nunez said another superior, Lt. Bernard Johnson, walked over from his post at Nocturnal and gestured at the officers in front of Space to converge on Puig and Westreicher. Nunez said Johnson directed him to pat the two men down. Nunez complied but wondered why it was necessary since these were hardly seasoned criminals. He couldn’t figure out why they were being arrested. Then he went back to directing traffic. “A few minutes later, Lt. Johnson calls me over there,” Nunez related. “His words to me are, ‘Your loyalty lies with the city of Miami. I don’t care if you disagree with the arrest. It’s a good arrest.’”

Nunez said that later another officer patted down and searched both men again. Puig started taking off his jewelry in preparation for going to jail. “I’m watching this, everyone on the scene were all dazed and confused as to what they were going to charge them with,” Nunez recalled. “The [law enforcement statute] book is open in the trunk of Officer Simmons’ car and they are scanning page by page. That right there told me they didn’t know what they’re doing.”

Nunez said the higher-ranking officers had Simmons make the arrest and fill out the form, even though she was not the one to witness the noise violation. There is a note to that effect on the arrest form itself. Nunez said he didn’t see any noise meters being used and none of the officers that night received a noise complaint as far as he knew. “In my opinion, they’ve been wanting that club for a long time,” he said. “Downtown has always been a quiet area. The clubs changed that. Space is the godfather of the clubs. Louis Puig is the Sam Walton, the Walt Disney of the club industry.”

While you digest that nugget of wisdom, let me just add that on Monday Puig’s attorney Alex Fox told me that he’d been notified the state was dropping the charges against both men, moved in part by Nunez’s story. As of press time, the county clerk’s record didn’t reflect that, but these things take time. As for Nunez, he mentioned that he was punished by his department for questioning the arrest, but did not want to go into details. I asked him why he talked to me. “I’m tired of the silence,” he replied. “They can stick that blue line up their ass.”

Adding to the unease in clubland, on May 22 local DJ Danny Tenaglia posted an anguished message on burlingtonnights.com about the closing of Twilo, a New York club legend that had opened its doors in downtown Miami less than a year ago. Tenaglia, who opened Space seven years ago, was a regular DJ at Twilo. “TWILO MIAMI is NO MORE!” he wrote. “SO SAD TO SAY THIS PEOPLE. BUT THERE TRULY WAS NO HOPE. 11th Street in Miami has become: THE MOST GHETTO OF CLUBLANDS - THAT MY EYES HAS EVER WITNESSED! AND THIS TRULY SADDENS ME DEEPLY!” Paper Magazine picked up on Tenaglia’s post on June 7 and compared Miami’s club district issues with those happening on West 27th Street in New York. “The cities’ original concept of keeping all the clubs in one zoned area has backfired by also bringing all the attendant problems to one neighborhood — and then blaming the clubs,” the magazine noted.

On June 8, two-year-old megaclub Nocturnal was shut down by Miami Police mid-event. They were executing a judgment lien against the club’s owner, Glenn Kofman. The lien was the result of a lawsuit filed by event company Toast of New York, which had been hired to produce the grand opening of the nightclub more than two years ago. The company was supposed to be paid some $300,000.

Kofman’s checks bounced, a lawsuit was filed and Toast of New York was awarded $1,060,006.80, plus interest. Kofman still didn’t pay up, so the company brought in the cops to seize club assets. Lawyers interceded and bought Nocturnal time, but gave up the club’s liquor license. Two weeks later, the police shut down the club after it continued to serve alcohol without the license. Sources indicated to the SunPost’s Conesa that Nocturnal figured Space had tipped the cops and caused the raid.

On the positive side, Club Space has now erected barriers on its patio to muffle sounds. Nocturnal will do the same if it ever reopens. Karu & Y on Northwest 14th Street has also dampened its sonic impact.

Eddie Padilla-Morales, administrator of the downtown NET office for the city of Miami, called recent events evidence of the “natural progression” of the area. “When the [entertainment] district was created, there was a sense that at a certain point in time it would become more difficult to conduct [club] business in the same way,” he said. “That time has probably come sooner than expected. The trouble is with the outdoor venues. That will be more difficult with condos coming on line.”

Padilla-Morales explained that the impact of sound downtown varies a lot depending on the environment — humidity, wind direction, ambient noise. The effects of the other human problems that concentrate in any nightclub district, he feels, are being mitigated by clubs that are now paying more attention to the types of promoters and security they have at their venues.

He thinks that not only can clubs coexist with condos, but downtown will require that synergy to revitalize.

Commissioner Sarnoff also believes there’s a place for the clubs — if the city provides the adult supervision. “They just need to behave themselves,” he said. “They need to respect their neighbors.”