It could be last call for Tin Cup’s on Rice Street.

Owner Gidget Bailey, 52, blames city leadership for failing to stem the violence that has turned her neighborhood on St. Paul’s North End into a place of dilapidated rentals and random shootings. As soon as her new place in Vadnais Heights has a kitchen installed, she said, she’s closing Tin Cup’s for good.

A Friday morning shooting in her parking lot, in which she said a bullet buzzed by her 27-year-old son’s ear, was the final straw.

“I’m very angry. I blame the city council and the mayor,” she said. “Our chief of police went in front of the city council and asked for 50 more officers, and it was denied.”

The police department’s authorized strength is currently 626 officers, and it operates on a $101 million budget. Adding 50 officers would have required an additional $4.5 million.

Mayor Melvin Carter said the request at the June council meeting was denied because he didn’t think more officers would solve the problem.

“The philosophy that more police officers, tougher prosecutors and bigger jails equal a safer city has failed. Our driving goal shouldn’t be to hire as many officers as possible but to reduce the number of times we have to call police in the first place,” he said in June.

Bailey disagrees.

“The approach our city officials are taking is not working,” she said. “I keep hearing about how the gun violence is going down in our city. It’s not going down in my neighborhood.”

Tin Cup’s has been around since 1946, and Bailey has been the owner since 2011. Her son and daughter and their spouses all work there, which makes her feel extra protective about the safety of the neighborhood.

She has met with her councilmember Amy Brendmoen and attended police meetings.

She organized a fundraiser earlier this year that brought in over 30 lights to help make dark streets and alleys feel safer.

“The lights are up and that didn’t work,” she said. “Every night I listen to the St. Paul police scanner on my phone. I heard a call come through that someone had been shot by Lamplighters.”

Lamplighter Lounge is about a mile north of Tin Cup’s on Rice Street. About 12:45 a.m. Friday, she heard that officers were also getting reports of shots fired at Tin Cup’s.

That’s when she decided she was done.

“My heart sank,” she said. “I don’t want to say I’m a quitter, but you know what, there’s no amount of money that can replace a life. My children and my grandchildren are my world.”

She recently purchased Old Clover Inn in Vadnais Heights on County Road F. It didn’t come with a kitchen, so she said she’ll keep Tin Cup’s open until she gets the Inn renovated. Until then, she’s changed her bar’s closing hour to 10 p.m. instead of 1 a.m.

“I just feel it’s safer,” she said. “We just don’t know what else to do.”

She’ll miss her old neighborhood, even if it doesn’t look like the one she grew up in anymore.

“Rice Street was like a city within a city. You could get whatever you needed within walking distance,” she said. “Neighbors took care of their homes and yards and looked out for each other’s children. Now it’s 70 percent rental property. I have four houses right across the street from me that should be bulldozed. We are considered one of the poorest neighborhoods in St. Paul.”

Brendmoen addressed the shooting in a Facebook post Friday.

Addressing gun violence in the North End needs everyone to be a part of the solution,” she wrote. “I know many of you have been working hard to create local solutions for our national problem. … It is terrifying to have this type of senseless violence in our neighborhoods and I know none of us condones it.”

Bailey won’t be looking back.

Vadnais Heights, she said, “is a very peaceful, beautiful community.”