For a city that wraps drunken depravity in a welcome hug, and one with a local jail notorious for unchecked beatings and rapes, it seemed like a pretty sharp idea: to let police chauffeur some of the publicly inebriated to a special place where they could straighten out from a hard bender in safety, skipping a night behind bars.
But just as the new “sobering center” was scheduled to open its doors on Dec. 4, 2011 — with ample support from police, elected leaders and key nonprofit groups — it nosedived like a tippler over a curb.