Published on GazetteNET (http://www.gazettenet.com)
Smith ends lease, but Green Street Cafe hangs on
By Kristin Palpini
Created 06/17/2009 -
NORTHAMPTON - Green Street Cafe was supposed to be vacated Sunday.
Last week owners John Sielski and Jim Dozmati received a lease termination notice from landlords, Smith College, for nonpayment of rent. The June 8 letter stated that cafe owners had five days to vacate 64 Green St. or pay the outstanding three months' rent.
But on Tuesday the money had not been paid and, in defiance of Smith's notice, it was business as usual at the French cuisine restaurant the two men started 18 years ago.
That afternoon, Sielski was sitting with customers in the main dining room going over a riffled-through newspaper. A waitress dressed in a black and white striped dress answered phones and brought tea to tables. The first-floor dining room carried a light aroma of white wine sauce. The restaurant hummed with light jazz music punctuated by the pinched beeps of a front-loader backing up outside.
"It was scary when that letter came last week," said Sielski. "The notice to vacate, the day we got it, it didn't hit us. The next day it was hard to put one foot in front of the other."
The notice to vacate is the latest twist in a five-year struggle between the college and the cafe over use of the 3,000-square-foot space at 64 Green St. The two have been wrangling over what, if anything, Smith College owes the cafe, due to disruptions caused by Smith's construction of Ford Hall, a 140,000-square-foot engineering and science building next door to the cafe.
Laurie Fenlason, Smith College's executive director of public affairs, confirmed the notice to vacate and said the college does not have any immediate plans for the cafe property.
"This all transpired very recently, and we haven't begun any discussions about future plans for the space," Fenlason said in an email to the Gazette.
Sielski said he has no plans to close Green Street Cafe. He and Dozmati will attempt to pay the back rent. A Smith College alumna and Florence resident, Jan Carhart, has offered to pay money owed to Smith, but it is unclear if the cash will be accepted by the college.
In the meantime, Sielski and Dozmati will continue to run the cafe until some kind of agreement is reached or they are forced out of the building.
"We'll put all the staff in camouflage," Sielski joked.
"This is just what we do," he added. "We're just going to come in here and try to concentrate on what it takes to run the cafe."
The latest twist
The relationship between Smith College and the Green Street Cafe was not always this contentious. For the first 13 years of the cafe's lease, the restaurant was an unofficial extension of the Smith College campus, catering events, hosting meetings and private engagements. Art, poetry readings and live music have long been a staple.
Around 2004, Smith College started moving forward with plans to develop an academic engineering building next door to the eatery. After that, the relationship between the cafe and the college was never the same.
Smith wanted the cafe to relocate and offered to pay $65,000 for moving expenses, but owners estimated it would cost $300,000 to relaunch the cafe in another location.
The cafe maintained its home on Green Street throughout construction, but closed for seven months in 2007 due to fire code violations, which also resulted in the restaurant's liquor license being suspended. The license was restored and the cafe reopened in September 2007.
Sielski said he fell three months behind in rent mostly due to a lack of revenue.
The restaurant's temporary closure severely interrupted business and the clientele has yet to rebound to pre-closing numbers, Sielski said. Also, Green Street Cafe has more recently been hamstrung by a lack of parking. According to a lawsuit filed by the cafe owners against Smith, the restaurant's back parking lot has been obstructed by Ford Hall construction. Sielski also complained that spaces along surrounding streets periodically have been made unavailable due to construction. In April, a judge ruled in favor of Smith, saying the college would suffer a greater loss if the work were prevented than the cafe would if it were allowed.
"You lose your parking, you lose your business," Sielski said.
Cafe owners are also grappling with $150,000 in back taxes owed to Northampton.
In the end, Smith wasn't paid because owners didn't have enough money to cover all their bills, Sielski said. Something had to go. Sielski said he and Dozmati decided to pay back a plumbing contractor instead of Smith.
"They stopped our ability to pay our rent when they took away our parking lot," Sielski said. "Effectively, they took away our business - it's not just parking spaces."
Now Sielski and Dozmati are trying to figure out how to keep Green Street Cafe alive despite the notice to vacate. Carhart, a longtime patron, has offered to pay the back rent to Smith College. She spoke with the college's attorney, but has not heard whether her money will be accepted, she said.
"It's not about getting our money back - we'll eat it off there in no time," Carhart said. By paying "the back rent, I would hope that it would at least freeze things for a while. I hope they (Smith and Green Street Cafe) would negotiate something that makes more sense."
Many options appear to be on the table for Sielski and Dozmati at the moment. Over a cup of tea Tuesday afternoon, Sielski discussed paying the back rent, legal options, starting another prepay dinner and lunch campaign, and moving the restaurant outside of Northampton.
Sielski, 60, acknowledged that opening a new restaurant at his age would be difficult, but the business is in his blood.
"This is our life," he said. "This is what we do."
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Boston Globe Reports on Plight of Green Street Cafe
Feud simmers as café fights expansion at Smith College
New building mars town-gown relations
New building mars town-gown relations
Employees at the Green Street Cafe in the shadow of Smith College in Northampton prepared for work recently at the restaurant. (Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff)
NORTHAMPTON - John Sielski and his partner, Jim Dozmati, have fallen on hard times. The owners of the venerable Green Street Café, a longtime favorite in this lively western Massachusetts city, they have remortgaged their house and sold off an adjacent piece of property, given up their private health insurance and signed onto the state plan, and slashed their employees' salaries by 20 percent.
Their woes are familiar in the midst of a battered economy. But the economy is not their problem, say the café owners, who have labored over signature dishes like escargot in parchment and chicken with peaches and sage for nearly two decades at the edge of the Smith College campus. Instead, they say, it is Smith - their landlord, closest neighbor, and, for many years, their best customer - that has driven them to the brink of closure.
The college is finishing construction this summer on Ford Hall, a gleaming science and engineering center next to the café. The $73 million, 140,000-square-foot structure, with state-of-the-art classrooms and an environmentally friendly design, is a striking addition on a campus where most science buildings date to the 1960s. It will house Smith's groundbreaking engineering program, the first in the country at a women's college.
But as Smith steps forward, say the restaurant owners next door, it has elbowed them out of the way. They say the college promised to relocate them but did not follow through, leaving them to suffer during two years of construction: trucks blocking their doors; noise and fumes; the loss of their parking lot for two and a half months. Most devastating was an eight-month closure, forced by problems with their Smith-owned building, that dragged on as they wrangled with the college over their lease.
The small-town feud has bitterly divided two institutions that were once a model of town-gown relations, and made things awkward for faculty and alumnae caught between their school and their love of a good meal.
Last week, college trustees sent the cash-strapped café a letter terminating its lease for missing rent payments.
"We thought we were in paradise here," said Sielski, 60, a white-haired native of the Pioneer Valley. "We were at the peak of our careers, with a wonderful following . . . Now all we want is to keep our restaurant."
College leaders say they have gone out of their way to help the café, offering moving expenses and halving the rent during construction. They say they have tried to minimize disruption, and were not responsible for the restaurant's closure because they did not acquire the building until 2007, just before building-code violations resulted in the loss of the café's liquor license.
What's good for the college will also boost the café, they said.
"With the opening of Ford Hall, the whole locus of activity is going to shift next door to them," said Laurie Fenlason, special assistant to Smith's president. "It's hard to see how that's going to mean less business."
Together for 32 years and married for five, Sielski and Dozmati moved to Northampton in 1990 from New York City, where they worked in catering and gardening. They restored a former rooming house on sleepy Green Street, and created a restaurant that felt like a dinner party, with its string of five small dining rooms, painted shades of wine or pumpkin, and presided over, always, by its two familiar hosts.
The café soon became a Smith College favorite, with as many as a dozen college receptions, dinners, and meetings held there each week.
"For ages, it was the faculty club away from the faculty club," said Jan Carhart, a Smith alumna who eats there frequently.
With business holding steady, Sielski and Dozmati honed their menu. They focused on local foods, and started growing produce in a sprawling backyard garden: 18 kinds of heirloom tomatoes; lavender for crème brûlée; strawberries to be served with almond crème anglaise.
Their reputation grew, and so did their following. Rachel Maddow, an MSNBC TV personality, called the café her "home away from home" in Travel + Leisure magazine. It became a home for local artists, too, with weekly poetry readings, in-house exhibitions, and musicians playing nightly for dinner.
The neighborhood was heading for a change, however. Seeking room to grow, Smith spent years buying up properties on its perimeter. The college demolished several apartment buildings to make way for Ford Hall, sparking protests by neighbors. College officials have said they might expand more into the neighborhood, casting the café's future further into question.
As the college prepared to break ground on its science center three years ago, talks about relocating the café broke down. The owners found a space, but said renovations would cost $700,000. Smith offered $65,000. The restaurant stayed put.
To express their growing anxiety, Sielski and Dozmati hired an artist to paint a 30-foot mural on one wall. Titled "The Last Staff Supper," it depicts the café's owners and employees dining together in the shadow of Smith's wrecking ball.
In February 2007, just before construction began, the city seized the café's liquor license for code violations. Sielski says the building had been marked for acquisition by Smith for years, and that college officials told him they would repair it, but never did. Fenlason, the college spokeswoman, said Smith acquired the building the same month the license was stripped.
The café shut its doors, and missed the lucrative spring graduation season. Disagreement with Smith over its lease postponed its reopening for months, Sielski said. The couple's income disappeared and their debts mounted, while veteran staff and customers drifted away. When they reopened eight months later, in October 2007, they rallied their regulars to get them through the costly start-up, selling prepaid dinners at a discount. But they have not recovered. The café owes $150,000 in back taxes, Sielski said, and its survival is uncertain.
The restaurant owners took Smith to court in April to stop construction crews from taking over their parking lot for 10 weeks. A judge declined to halt the work, saying the likely damage to Smith outweighed the restaurant's pain.
The two men said they will fight on in court, seeking damages, an apology, and to save what they call their life's work.
The fighting has embarrassed some café devotees. "It's mortifying," said Carhart, the Smith alumna. "It hurts, because I think the world of Smith."
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
Their woes are familiar in the midst of a battered economy. But the economy is not their problem, say the café owners, who have labored over signature dishes like escargot in parchment and chicken with peaches and sage for nearly two decades at the edge of the Smith College campus. Instead, they say, it is Smith - their landlord, closest neighbor, and, for many years, their best customer - that has driven them to the brink of closure.
The college is finishing construction this summer on Ford Hall, a gleaming science and engineering center next to the café. The $73 million, 140,000-square-foot structure, with state-of-the-art classrooms and an environmentally friendly design, is a striking addition on a campus where most science buildings date to the 1960s. It will house Smith's groundbreaking engineering program, the first in the country at a women's college.
But as Smith steps forward, say the restaurant owners next door, it has elbowed them out of the way. They say the college promised to relocate them but did not follow through, leaving them to suffer during two years of construction: trucks blocking their doors; noise and fumes; the loss of their parking lot for two and a half months. Most devastating was an eight-month closure, forced by problems with their Smith-owned building, that dragged on as they wrangled with the college over their lease.
The small-town feud has bitterly divided two institutions that were once a model of town-gown relations, and made things awkward for faculty and alumnae caught between their school and their love of a good meal.
Last week, college trustees sent the cash-strapped café a letter terminating its lease for missing rent payments.
"We thought we were in paradise here," said Sielski, 60, a white-haired native of the Pioneer Valley. "We were at the peak of our careers, with a wonderful following . . . Now all we want is to keep our restaurant."
College leaders say they have gone out of their way to help the café, offering moving expenses and halving the rent during construction. They say they have tried to minimize disruption, and were not responsible for the restaurant's closure because they did not acquire the building until 2007, just before building-code violations resulted in the loss of the café's liquor license.
What's good for the college will also boost the café, they said.
"With the opening of Ford Hall, the whole locus of activity is going to shift next door to them," said Laurie Fenlason, special assistant to Smith's president. "It's hard to see how that's going to mean less business."
Together for 32 years and married for five, Sielski and Dozmati moved to Northampton in 1990 from New York City, where they worked in catering and gardening. They restored a former rooming house on sleepy Green Street, and created a restaurant that felt like a dinner party, with its string of five small dining rooms, painted shades of wine or pumpkin, and presided over, always, by its two familiar hosts.
The café soon became a Smith College favorite, with as many as a dozen college receptions, dinners, and meetings held there each week.
"For ages, it was the faculty club away from the faculty club," said Jan Carhart, a Smith alumna who eats there frequently.
With business holding steady, Sielski and Dozmati honed their menu. They focused on local foods, and started growing produce in a sprawling backyard garden: 18 kinds of heirloom tomatoes; lavender for crème brûlée; strawberries to be served with almond crème anglaise.
Their reputation grew, and so did their following. Rachel Maddow, an MSNBC TV personality, called the café her "home away from home" in Travel + Leisure magazine. It became a home for local artists, too, with weekly poetry readings, in-house exhibitions, and musicians playing nightly for dinner.
The neighborhood was heading for a change, however. Seeking room to grow, Smith spent years buying up properties on its perimeter. The college demolished several apartment buildings to make way for Ford Hall, sparking protests by neighbors. College officials have said they might expand more into the neighborhood, casting the café's future further into question.
As the college prepared to break ground on its science center three years ago, talks about relocating the café broke down. The owners found a space, but said renovations would cost $700,000. Smith offered $65,000. The restaurant stayed put.
To express their growing anxiety, Sielski and Dozmati hired an artist to paint a 30-foot mural on one wall. Titled "The Last Staff Supper," it depicts the café's owners and employees dining together in the shadow of Smith's wrecking ball.
In February 2007, just before construction began, the city seized the café's liquor license for code violations. Sielski says the building had been marked for acquisition by Smith for years, and that college officials told him they would repair it, but never did. Fenlason, the college spokeswoman, said Smith acquired the building the same month the license was stripped.
The café shut its doors, and missed the lucrative spring graduation season. Disagreement with Smith over its lease postponed its reopening for months, Sielski said. The couple's income disappeared and their debts mounted, while veteran staff and customers drifted away. When they reopened eight months later, in October 2007, they rallied their regulars to get them through the costly start-up, selling prepaid dinners at a discount. But they have not recovered. The café owes $150,000 in back taxes, Sielski said, and its survival is uncertain.
The restaurant owners took Smith to court in April to stop construction crews from taking over their parking lot for 10 weeks. A judge declined to halt the work, saying the likely damage to Smith outweighed the restaurant's pain.
The two men said they will fight on in court, seeking damages, an apology, and to save what they call their life's work.
The fighting has embarrassed some café devotees. "It's mortifying," said Carhart, the Smith alumna. "It hurts, because I think the world of Smith."
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
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