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The Tuesday after the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations’ public hearing with Joey Vento, owner of Geno’s Steak’s, customers were undeterred in their patronage, flocking to the neon-orange establishment at 1219 S. Ninth St.
Glenn Reber, who makes a stop at the steak shop when in town from Reading, describes his feelings toward the signs Vento has posted that read, "This is America. When ordering please speak English," as "ambivalent."
"I think he has a right to post the sign," Reber said. "I just think we’re so damn sensitive as a society that, I mean, words don’t hurt. I mean they can hurt people obviously, but I don’t think that does. It’s much ado about nothing, frankly."
Days earlier, the scene at the Arch Street Meeting House wasn’t too far from what you’d find at Geno’s on a busy night. It was fairly well-attended by a colorful group of people, with about 100 of them taking up room on the century-old benches. Some, brandishing signs that read "Hail Geno" were supporters of the establishment’s owner. Others were not as welcoming to the former resident of Eighth and Reed streets, whose eatery is almost as recognizable as the man who’s been operating it for more than 40 years.
Vento was there defending his right to post the signs on two of his ordering windows. The signs, which also display a bald eagle and an American flag, was referred to by him and his two lawyers as a request rather than a demand. Since June 2006, the signs have been a hot-button issue, catching national attention and sparking debates on immigration and free speech. The sign also caught the eye of the commission, which filed the complaint against the eatery claiming it violates the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance by "discouraging patronage by non-English speaking customers, all because of national origin and/or ancestry."
That was still to be determined at the end of the six-hour hearing, but, either way, Vento made one thing clear inside and outside the meeting room: He would not back down.
"I’m a multimillionaire," the 67-year-old said outside the hearing. "I’ve got more money than I can ever spend in my life. What am I going to do? Close up, put my wife on a Harley and go off into the sunset? I’ll be a martyr."
Vento firmly stated the sign was staying put. To him, it’s an opinion he feels he has the right to display at his business, where he said no one has ever been refused service.
"If you don’t speak [English], guess what, you just might get what’s coming off the line next," he said. "You don’t go away without a product. Nobody gets refused. Just put your $7 up over there. If I don’t understand, you’re going to get whatever comes out of my hand next."
The commission, whose three-member panel was chaired by Joseph Centeno, wasn’t there to debate whether or not the 780,000 cheesesteaks Geno’s sells a year were given to everyone in line; they were there to determine what the sign implies.
Shannon Goessling, of Atlanta-based Southeastern Legal Foundation who is representing Vento, said the defense of her client’s sign was just as clear-cut: "He runs a successful business; he has strong political views. Mr. Vento has communicated his belief on a topic that is timely. And the question is: Do you want the freedom from being offended or do you want the freedom of speech? You can’t have both."
Days later, Goessling reiterated the three reasons her pro bono public interest law center came to Vento’s defense.
"One is the commission has no jurisdiction because language is not a protected class. The second is the violation of due process rights under the 14th Amendment. And this is a statement of political speech protected by the 1st and 14th Amendments in the U.S. Constitution and also the Pennsylvania Constitution," she said. "Even if it wasn’t political speech, Mr. Vento has legitimate business purposes for the sign and, as a result, it is protected."
Goessling also said no one person has actually come forth to file a discrimination complaint against Vento or Geno’s. Instead, she added, it was the commission as a whole that filed the complaint, another reason the defense felt the case should be thrown out.
Friday, prosecution and defense went through rounds of questions with the witnesses. The former called several to the stand — among them Penn sociology professor Camille Charles, whose studies of neighborhoods surrounding Geno’s showed Latino and Asian population increases as high as 240 percent over the last two decades.
Charles testified the signs are "insensitive" and "exclusionary" and likened them to those of the Jim Crow era that read "Whites Only." She said the consequences of the signs then and now were similar, "but in many cases you wouldn’t know because people are too afraid to order."
The prosecution also called four other witnesses: commission chairman the Rev. James Allen Sr.; Kenneth Wong, a member of the Asian community; Roberto Santiago, executive director of the Council of Spanish Speaking Organizations of Philadelphia; and Ricardo Diaz, a student who had conducted interviews with Latinos for research while obtaining a graduate degree. In addition to Vento, the defense called Ms. Davies, a member of the audience Goessling met at the hearing. Davies is of Latino descent and testified against what Charles said regarding the sign.
Before he testified in the last hours of the hearing, Vento had no qualms about speaking his mind. "They’ve never been to my place, they have no clue," he said of the prosecution’s witnesses outside the meeting room. "And another thing, they don’t understand if they would have paid attention, you see every nationality at my store, whatever it is."
"That’s not true," exclaimed a bystander outside the hearing.
"Will you get outta here," Vento said, gesturing toward the voice. "You’ll see every nationality at my store, OK? And if this birdbrain back here would go and take the time, he’ll see it himself.
"If you want to come into this country, if you want to be successful, then you learn to speak English. If you don’t want to speak English, what’d you come here for? You already left the country that spoke the language that you want us to try to learn. So go back there and fix the problem you had there. Don’t come to America and try to fix something that’s not broken. When did the English language become discriminatory?"
A ruling from the commission is expected within two months. In the meantime, the transcript will be produced, Goessling said, and both sides have 45 days to prepare findings of fact and conclusions of law based on the transcript, after which they may submit briefs in support of what each believes the ruling should be.
Goessling said she hopes the commission "follows the law and dismisses the complaint against Mr. Vento, but if politics continue to control this process as it appears to have done so far, we will end up appealing the decision of the commission to the Court of Common Pleas," which would mean another hearing.
The commission could choose to rule several ways, she said, and can order Vento to take the sign down, fine him or send him to political-correctness classes. "They have a tremendous amount of power," she said.
Hummer did not return phone calls by press time to comment on the hearing or his hopes for the outcome.
In the meantime, Vento’s sign will remain and the cheesesteaks will keep coming.
"Now did you ever see the commercial with the credit card?" Vento said outside the hearing, referencing Visa’s ads that show a world flowing smoothly until someone moves from using a credit card to a check. "You go down and you push the credit card, everything’s going good, the music’s going. Then you get a guy that comes up with cash and, boom, everything stops, people fall on each other.
"Well picture Joey Vento’s Geno’s Cheesesteak line on a Friday or Saturday night. Same procedure. Guys coming up: ‘Give me a whiz with onions,’ ‘I want a provolone with onions,’ ‘I want American with onions,’" he said, followed by indecipherable gibberish.
"Everything stops. That’s why you must speak English."
