Dear Tenants, Please Leave. Love, Hotel Breslin
Hip Seattle hotelier wants ‘to celebrate’ Broadway fleabag with very tight guest list
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Tales of Retail
Seattle native Alex Calderwood is fired up to finally be in New York City.
“We’ve been interested in New York for a long time,” said the co-founder of ultra-hip Ace Hotel Group, who recently relocated to Manhattan amid plans to open the first East Coast outpost of his fledging yet fashionable brand of lodgings later this year.
“On the West Coast, one of our No. 1 cities, as far as people coming to us, is New York,” he said. “So I think the converse will be true, that we will also have a great audience, a great appeal, hopefully, in the New York market.”
Mr. Calderwood and Co. are taking over management of the old Breslin Hotel on the corner of Broadway and West 29th Street, where massive renovations are planned over the next year to convert the shabby landmark residential building into a trendy hotel for tourists.
It’s a big job, as the ancient, 360-unit single-room-occupancy dwelling, opened in 1904, will require some rather commodious reconstruction. “We need to add bathrooms,” he said (the old hotel currently offers only shared facilities in the hallways), “and there’s infrastructure and things that eat up square footage. We’ll come in around 250 rooms.”
Mr. Calderwood and developers Andrew Zobler and Allen Gross hope to reopen a revamped Breslin with better plumbing, among other things, next December.
“We’re definitely on track,” Mr. Calderwood told The Observer this week, seemingly unfazed by recent litigation aiming to derail the modish transformation.
On Jan. 30, a lawyer representing several tenants who currently live in the Breslin will argue in court that alleged “veiled threats” and “interruption of essential services” in the months leading up to the planned hotel conversion has constituted an illegal form of harassment intended to drive out the rent-regulated residents.
If a judge agrees, then the city could revoke the necessary permits, spoiling Ace Hotel’s much anticipated Big Apple debut.
Recent living conditions, as described by angry residents in court papers, are a far cry from even the minimalist comforts that guests at existing Ace locations in Seattle and Portland are accustomed to: chronic heating problems, mounds of untended garbage piling up, elevators constantly malfunctioning—the doors of the lifts noisily slamming shut, swinging open, shutting, opening, over and over, like some chomping mechanical monster.
On one occasion last March, an elevator purportedly jammed shut, trapping a guy inside for nearly a half-hour as a firefighter tried to pry him out.
The shared bathrooms and common areas, meanwhile, are described as unkempt, to say the least, with “faucets taped with duct tape” and “a partition tied together with what looked like a shoelace.”
Amid all the alleged dysfunction and disrepair, unhappy inhabitants say they have been repeatedly hounded to accept a payoff and move out—and at least 150 or so already have, according to court papers—yet many choose to remain, clinging to the Breslin’s cheap rent and central Manhattan location.
One firmly entrenched resident even refused a proposed relocation to another rent-stabilized building, preferring to stay “close to work” in the run-down Broadway hostelry “rather than being in some shady area” in Brooklyn, according to her testimony.
Mr. Calderwood said he isn’t concerned about potential delays resulting from the lawsuit. “We’ve been working very, very closely with the tenants,” he said. “I’m confident that everything will work out for everyone.”
Perhaps that confidence comes from the fact that one judge already dismissed the residents’ complaints, noting that there was “limited documentation to corroborate the tenants’ testimony,” as city records showed relatively few building violations at the Breslin over the past three years.
“The evidence regarding these encounters demonstrates that the Breslin management made continued efforts to reach buyout agreements with as many tenants as possible, including financial payouts and relocations to rent-regulated apartments. This falls far short of harassment,” ruled Faye Lewis, administrative law judge, in an August 2007 decision. Next Page >
408 East 79th Street
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There is more going on inside the building than most people know. GFI has not been straight with any of the tenants from the beginning- the most they have offered as a buyout to toss people out of their homes is 50k - that is no buyout. For 50k one tenant can rent an apartment in the area for the next year and then move into Madison square park with the real bums. Most peole want to believe everyone in the Breslin is a lowlife - we are not -we are real people living in NYC and I'll tell you there are a bunch of us not leaving the Breslin - looking forward to meeting the guests at the Ace Hotel (if the Ace will open at all). The illegal workers - at least they don't speak or read English in the building. They even took out a stairway wall - not sure how legal that is. Some of the walls they busted out are surely questionable to us - not to mention the sneeky intercom system GFI thinks they will screw the tenants over with. These people are up to no good - if they were straight with us from the beginning they would have already had their hotel - but they just won't go legit!
GFI is sneaky, the best you can do is support one another, to counteract their fear tactics. Be aware they may well have hire spies, we think they have 2-3, all moved in recently.
Make as much noise as you can, get someone on your side in the press, NYT, Voice, etc.
The "make as much noise as you can" has seemed to be the theme enacted by certain tenants who have articled an enormous amount of mistrust in the process of change. And, yes, there has certainly been as much "noise" made as possible, as the sounds of sirens have been almost constant around here lately. sct
It so happens that the tenants ended up, in the long run, being treated with consideration and fairness by GFI, and that has not been proven to be good enough for some people, which is truly unfortunate.
Yes, I am a tenant in the building who has seen all sides of this story, and really witnessed what has gone on with both management and tenants. When the former landlord made it known that there would be a transfer in management and a substantial renovation to our building, we all felt the need to organize to lawfully protect our own rent-stabilization rights. That we did, and it was a good idea to do so. After all, we did not know, back then, what the outcome would be.
S.C., the attorney representing the tenants, initiated actions in good faith and in our best interests. She tried very hard, and succeeded, in allowing all of us to feel like we were being represented by competent counsel. Her history for protecting tenants in the name of public good is honorable and should never go unrecognized, even if she was not able, at certain tribunals, to prove her case beyond a reasonable doubt. She should be appreciated for her efforts on our behalf as we all owe her a debt of gratitude for serving us in the interest of our own entitled protections.
Onward, the new owners of the building, after prevailing in a court case which involved the jurisdiction of an administrative law judge, have really tried to reach out to the tenants on an individual basis through two of their agents, A.C. and L.K, in what I believe was an effort to end any hard feelings and heal a divided residential community. A.C. and L.K. have both undertaken the time and effort to really listen to each and every tenant that came to them with concerns, and have worked as hard as they could to accommodate people in every single way possible. Some people asked for buy-outs and got them. Some people relocated within the building and are content. Some people chose to remain right where they are, and have not, as far as I know, been pressured by management to surrender their units. Some of the people who chose to remain where they are have expressed a desire to relocate to another floor that may end up being entirely residential, but management ceased the granting of this opportunity on a collective basis, because it seemed as if they were trying to accommodate us but were being met with too much resistance which finally proved to be too much. It is my wish that management would reconsider this decision and continue negotiating with individuals who wish for nothing more than to relocate within the building, get themselves settled, and go on with their lives. But, in order for management to resume this endeavor, there has to be a certain amount of trust and stability within this community, but, unfortunately, resistance remains on the part of some.
So here we are in the middle of the summer of 2008, and I can honestly stay that I am glad that I stayed here. Yes, there is construction going on, but we expected this. It is a slight inconvenience so far, but the inconveniences imposed are pretty minimal. I must mention that if it were not for both the services of tenant attorney S.C. and the good-faith efforts that management extended to the remaining tenants, then I would have left the building a long time ago. Attorney S.C. made it clear to us that we did not ever have to leave, as long as we were lawful lease holders, and management, in the long run, proved to be more than willing to cooperate with the lease holders and repair relations on all fronts.
Unfortunately this ordeal has resulted in some infighting within the roster of the actual remaining tenants, but it is all so ridiculous, as all of these people are pretty nice people whom otherwise would get along fine if it weren't for mistrust and individual power struggles, which is what it seems to amount to.
Hopefully we will all be a big, happy family once again, and life will go on as both the tenants may one day relinquish any lingering concerns for the status of their longevity in the building, and the corporate agents who have presently taken over will be able to complete their project without further interruptions and complications.