The neighbors of Brick Bistro have spent years trying to keep the restaurant from getting a liquor license. What happens next could affect all Baltimore residents.

The space behind Red Fish Liquors on Falls Road was an old garage in 2021, the year Wayne Laing announced he wanted to open a karaoke bar in its place.

Neighbors were incensed. They pictured late, loud crowds and went to Baltimore’s zoning board to push back on Laing’s pitch. There already wasn’t enough parking in the area, they argued, and this part of Hampden was residential. The zoning board sided with them, twice turning down Laing’s request for live entertainment.

But Laing wasn’t done with his quest to bring a restaurant to the building, which sits on a narrow, one-way street. This year, the former 13.5% Wine Bar operator opened Brick Bistro, a BYOB, in the space.

Yet in the four intervening years, Hampden residents have only heightened their opposition to his business. Last year, they were enraged over plans to name the bar Block 10, which shared a name with a barracks in Auschwitz. Laing, who did not respond to a request for comment, later changed course.

“It’s a nightmare,” said Thelma Heck, who lives just up the road from Brick Bistro’s entrance on West 40th Street. She said that even as a BYOB, the spot has transformed a “quiet little street” into a rowdy destination. Crowds “kept me up all night Sunday night,” she said.

Now she and other residents are taking what I’ve come to think of as the nuclear option in local liquor licenses. By law, if more than 50% of residents within 200 feet of a business in Baltimore sign a petition opposing its liquor license, the establishment can’t have one. Sometimes people will threaten such a petition drive to get a business owner to agree to certain operating terms, laid out in memoranda of understanding, or MOUs.

But the 200-foot rule is usually more of a threat than anything else. Douglas Paige, executive secretary of the liquor board, said he was unaware of a case in recent memory where petitioners had successfully stopped a license from being issued.

Recent efforts in Fells Point failed when neighbors couldn’t get enough signatures. And the whole process isn’t as simple as just signing a petition. Residents need to survey their neighborhood and offer evidence that they have met the legal threshold. To face down challenges, they need to offer notarized affidavits from all the petitioners, or have them show up to the hearing in person.

“It’s a really hard standard to meet,” said Amy Petkovsek, executive director of the Community Law Center.

After a few false starts, Hampden residents, together with the Hampden Community Council, have now done all that. They were prepared last month to go before Baltimore’s board of liquor license commissioners, a state-run agency, to make their case. But Laing’s attorney, Peter Prevas, said he was going to argue that the 200-foot rule, which goes back to the end of Prohibition, is on its face unconstitutional and violates the 14th Amendment.

Prevas believes history is on his side. Letting residents determine whether a business can get — or keep — its liquor license delegates government authority to private individuals. A series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions have said that’s illegal.

Prevas has been waiting 30 years to make this argument. In 1995, he represented the owners of Kali’s Court, a Fells Point bar that, like Brick Bistro, faced significant neighborhood opposition. But because the business eventually got its liquor license, the case became moot.

Back in March, commissioners decided to postpone Laing’s case to give Hampden residents time to lawyer up. They sought help from the Community Law Center, which often represents neighbors in cases like this. Petkovsek, its executive director, said she’ll be closely monitoring what happens next. The 200-foot law, Petkovsek said, is constitutional because a liquor license isn’t just a piece of property, “it’s a privilege.” And even if the law did need to be changed, she said, that should be done through Annapolis, not at the liquor board.

We’ll see if Baltimore’s liquor board agrees at this week’s hearing.

Laing and his neighbors on Thursday will go before the commissioners, who will need to pick a winner. Whichever side loses could appeal. If the case ends up going before the Maryland Supreme Court, it could have statewide implications.

Either way, Petkovsek said, “it could get messy.”