Church Called Unneighborly by Tattoo Parlor, Bike Shop

WASHINGTON — In Manassas, Va., Bubba’s Cycle Shack, the Exposed Temptations Tattoo Shop and Blessed Victory Church share a building. And it’s not working.

The reason? The other tenants say the church makes too much noise.

The Pentecostal church began renting the space in an industrial area of Manassas in November, which is when, as landlord Howard Kim recalls, “I got a complaint from the tattoo guy.”

That would be Greg Piper, a man with a ponytail and an earring who says he has more tattoos than he can count.

“They have a drum set and an amplified P.A. system,” said Piper, who owns the tattoo parlor across the hall from Blessed Victory, a 20-member congregation that meets three times a week. “Just the noise was the only problem. The people were nice.”

So Piper went before the Manassas City Council last month to protest the church’s request for a special-use permit. The church needed the permit to continue holding services in the building, which is zoned for business uses.

Piper told council members that the gospel music was distracting him from his work.

“It’s like any kind of art,” he said of tattooing. “You want to focus on the concentration and the client.”

It was even worse downstairs at Bubba’s, Piper said, where all of the activity from the church above caused some tiles to fall from the ceiling and merchandise to drop from the shelves.

“The building isn’t zoned for a church, and there shouldn’t be a church there,” said Tom Davison, who owns Bubba’s.

Church representatives said Piper probably was upset because they had asked him to remove a picture they considered offensive from his shop window. Piper described the image as “kind of like an angel with wings and one of the breasts exposed.”

Manassas officials, trying to be supportive of both religion and commerce, were hoping to find a way to make peace.

They learned this week that the church had done it for them: Blessed Victory announced plans to move.

“It was causing so much disturbance,” Assistant Pastor Alice Basnight said. “We’re a people of peace. . . . We’ll be out.”