Smith Alumna Blasts President Christ's Office for Bullying Green Street Cafe

Jan Carhart, MSW

Ms. Laurie Fenlason

Executive Director of Public Affairs

and Special Assistant to the President

Smith College

Northampton, MA 01063 July 19, 2009

Dear Ms. Fenlason:

Many thanks for your recent reply to my letter concerning Green Street Café. I also appreciate having a copy of the piece you wrote for the Hampshire Gazette.

While it’s clear that your understanding of the situation and that of the owners of Green Street Café differ dramatically, I remain convinced that the construction process and Smith’s handling of it has done the Café great harm. It appears the College expected John and Jim to forego their original lease with its option to extend the lease and to absorb the considerable expense of relocating, remodeling at a new location, and re-establishing their business elsewhere for approximately $65,000 -- only $35,000 of which entailed an actual cash payment to cover the substantial cost involved.

This hardly seems reasonable when an established business with a solid lease in place is generating gross revenues up to $700,000.00 or more per year and is comfortably providing income and benefits to two owners plus approximately ten fulltime employees. (Another ten or so part time employees received income, but no benefits.) Having spent many years working in financial and investment management, I fail to see the attractiveness -- much less generosity -- of such an offer and, in the absence of the College negotiating more reasonable terms, can only describe Smith’s position as, at best, mean-spirited or even sharp-dealing and bullying. It clearly left Jim and John with no alternative but to attempt continuing their business in the face of all the various problems created by the construction.

Furthermore, the implication that Green Street Café has no basis for claiming that the College “ceased doing business with the Café” seems disingenuous. There are, I know, many Smith employees who personally enjoy the restaurant and who likely use it for College-related functions now and then. In 2003 or 2004, however, Smith revoked the Café’s ability to bill the College directly for such functions, requiring instead that those hosting them pay personally by check or credit card then seek reimbursement from the College. It seems fair to say that refusing to accept invoices from the Café for college functions, among a handful of other actions apparently taken by the College, constituted a decision by Smith as an institution to cease doing direct business with the Café and dramatically diminished the income generated by the restaurant’s major institutional client. It terminated the friendly, mutually beneficial relationship the Café and Smith once enjoyed, a situation that seems especially unfortunate when the alternatives to using Green Street Café may in fact be more costly to the College.

I don’t want to spend time here reviewing other perspectives on the parking situation, on the Café’s closing over fire code issues, and various other things. Suffice it to say that I fear Smith has chosen to discredit the valid concerns and needs of an established commercial tenant in order to assert its own interests in the property. In doing so the College has severely financially compromised the café owners and their employees. Rather than displaying the caring, responsible behavior of a good citizen, the College appears willing to trample a tenant whose interests do not match those of the College, even in the face of those divergent interests having a leasehold interest that should protect them.

In short, I couldn’t be sorrier to learn that Smith is determined to pursue the course it has chosen. That said, if, at any time, my earlier offer might prove helpful, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Sincerely yours,

Jan Carhart

Daily Hampshire Gazette Reports on Eviction Notice from Smith College

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

Boston Globe Reports on Plight of Green Street Cafe

Feud simmers as café fights expansion at Smith College
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)

By Jenna Russell
Globe Staff / June 16, 2009

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.

Article found in the Smith College Sophian 4/16/09

Ford Hall Construction Creates Conflict with Green Street Cafe

Clare Lynch
Issue date: 4/16/09

Controversy over the construction of the new Ford Hall engineering building on Green Street was highlighted last month when the owners of the Green Street Cafe filed a lawsuit seeking to halt construction that would block access to the cafe. On April 3, the Daily Hampshire Gazette reported that Judge Peter Veilis ruled in favor of Smith College, allowing construction to resume on April 6.

This latest conflict over the Ford Hall construction project shows the difficulty of balancing the college's expansion interests with those of the local community and businesses.

Laurie Fenlason, executive director of Public Affairs and College Relations, characterizes the Ford Hall construction as "a straightforward project" that "will result in significant improvements not only for Smith, but for the Cafe." Fenlason said the project "has been needlessly protracted and complicated" by the lawsuit.

John Sielski, who owns Green Street Cafe with James Dozmati, said they have been "ruined, both personally and financially" by the construction project. Sielski said Smith's actions in pursuing the Ford Hall construction are the latest in a series of actions that have "damaged [the cafe] beyond repair" and left him feeling "betrayed" after a long-time partnership with the college.

The lawsuit filed by Sielski and Dozmati specifically addressed parking and access to the cafe. Construction closed off portions of Arnold Street and shut down the parking lot behind the cafe, where the restaurant used to offer outdoor lunch service.

Judge Veilis ruled that while the cafe had sustained damage from the construction, the damage to Smith from halting the construction project would be more consequential.

As a replacement for the cafe's 16-space parking lot that has been closed, Smith has reserved 16 spaces for cafe workers and customers in the Dickinson parking lot directly across the street. Smith lots and the parking garage near the cafe are also open to the public after 5 p.m. on weekdays and all day during the weekend, Fenlason noted.

In a letter to the editor published on February 20 in the Gazette, Fenlason wrote, "The college also made voluntary improvements to the [cafe] building to mitigate noise and dust impacts, allowing the cafe to continue to offer a comfortable dining experience."

However, the cafe's business has still suffered, according to Sielski. He estimates that lunch business decreased 75 percent in two weeks.

"They took away our neighborhood," said Sielski. "They took away our parking. They took away our peace and quiet so that we couldn't use one whole side of the building during the day for the last 18 months."

Since the owners were unable to finance a protracted legal battle against the college, Sielski said they have been unable to confront Smith about the damages to their business from the Ford Hall project in the last few years.

"We've agreed to everything they've told us to do," Sielski said. "Carol Christ said for years she was going to keep us whole. The mayor made the same promise, because Green Street was important to Northampton and the Smith community. And if this is whole, I don't want to know what not being whole is."

Smith holds the lease for the cafe building. The college has marked the building as a site for possible future expansion, according to the Smith Web site, but the cafe has a lease through 2012.

In Fall 2005, Smith made a written offer to the Cafe owners to reduce the rent on the building or to pay moving costs if the owners chose to relocate, according to Fenlason's February 20 letter.

This, according to Fenlason's letter, is one of the ways Smith has attempted to work with the owners "in recognition of the fact that construction on Ford Hall ... would be disruptive."

"The Mayor's Office and the college have extended financial assistance, business counseling, and numerous accommodations to the Cafe in support of its operations," Fenlason wrote.

Sielski, however, said that the money Smith offered was not enough to start and sustain a restaurant in a new location. Construction and renovations in the Arnold Avenue area are scheduled for completion May 22. The cafe parking lot will be reopened at that time.

The Ford Hall Web site notes that Smith has less space per student than many other colleges, only 125 acres for 2,600 students, meaning that future expansion may not be slowed despite conflicts such as those with Green Street Cafe.

In the meantime, both Fenlason and Sielski acknowledged that the college and the cafe are linked.

"We have a national reputation," Sielski said. "We do a good job, and Smith has benefited from the very good job we do. We also realize we probably wouldn't be here if not for Smith."

Letter To the Editor that the Daily Hampshire Gazette refused to run

We wanted our friends and fans to know that Carolyn Creedon sent a letter to the editor to the Daily Hampshire Gazette in support of our efforts to raise awareness in the Northampton community about Smith College's tactics in trying to hurt the Green Street Cafe. The newspaper refused to run the letter so we are providing it for your information. Please support the Green Street Cafe, a true community-oriented and socially conscious business serving our customers in the Pioneer Valley for more than 20 years.

March 13, 2009

To the Editor:

I lived in Northampton for three years while pursuing a degree at Smith, which as I recall was, at least three years ago, a liberal arts college with strong ties to the community and to its thriving cultural scene. I amassed quite a bit of student debt, but I wouldn't trade my time in Northampton or at Smith for anything. Smith's faculty and staff are deeply committed to reaching out to students and to the community, and I count many of them as influential friends to this day.

I wish I could say the same about the Smith College administration and its trampling of Green Street Cafe. My husband, Paul Andrews, worked there full time while we lived in Northampton and so it was Green Street that made it possible for me to afford to go to Smith, loans or not. I recently read Laurie Fenlason's response in your paper to Green Street's struggle to survive under the ironic heading "Smith College has tried to help cafe" (the capital letters duking it out with the non-caps didn't escape my notice). Fenlason writes, of the claim that Smith has ceased doing business with the Cafe (capital letters, thank you): "[this] will come as a surprise to many of the college's employees and departments who eat there regularly." This has a whiff of the paternalistic. Loyal customers notwithstanding, Smith has affixed its giant corporate financial spigot to run in favor of restaurants who are not blocking their behemothian engineering building-- it is that simple. The pettiness of the liquor suspensions and code violations (coincidence? no) bode well for Smith's new building, as these too seem engineered to drive Green Street Cafe into the ground, literally. These would be the same "violations" Fenlason takes pains to cite.

Jim Dozmati and John Sielski opened their hearts to me and my husband, indeed to hundreds of friends, customers, and employees in their little fine dining restaurant, which is a family endeavor in the best sense. I have seen them feed people who had no money. I have been to their garden. I was there when they said their vows. I was around when Jim and John put on a full spread of food and drink and celebration in hosting-- gratis -- a painting exhibition for one of their waiters. I have witnessed their unfailing support for culture in Northampton in so many ways. They have been doing these things since they opened the Cafe in 1990.

I can't bemoan any more the school of engineering that slouches toward Green Street to be born. That's done and done. What I need to do is beseech President Christ, whom I know to be passionate about supporting culture and the arts, to extend her hand to the Cafe in arbitration. Green Street Cafe is an institution and a family. Can't Smith College do better than all this nastiness and Goliath game-playing in service to to its good and loyal neighbor? We are talking about livelihoods here, and dreams built, and growing things, and breaking bread, and living, breathing art in all its forms.

Sincerely,
Carolyn Creedon

Travel + Leisure Magazine

The Green Street Café is listed as a favorite place in Massachusetts for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. In Travel + Leisure’s March 2009 issue, she referred to it as her “home away from home.”

KEEPING THE GREEN STREET CAFE ALIVE

Keeping the Green Street Cafe alive
By Daily Hampshire Gazette
Created 02/16/2009 - 10:28

Becoming a cultural fixture in a community as rich in culture as Northampton is something to be proud of. It's been our life pursuit to create a place that matters and to provide an experience that people remember. And it's been an honor to serve every patron that has walked through the doors of our establishment - Green Street Cafe - since we first opened in 1990.
We have every intention of continuing to serve those patrons for many years to come. But the future of Green Street Cafe is being placed in jeopardy by a much larger and more powerful cultural institution: Smith College.
For many years, Green Street Cafe - located on the grounds of Smith - operated in a healthy partnership with the college. We developed a good business from students, faculty and staff while providing them a high-quality option for meals in a convenient location.
In addition, as our reputation grew and the creative menu and good service at Green Street Cafe became more established, we earned national recognition in publications such as Gourmet Magazine, Bon Appetit, Yankee Magazine and The New York Times. In our admittedly tiny corner of the Smith universe, we like to think we have overachieved in bringing positive attention to the campus.
Unfortunately, our contribution to the Smith College community has been received with something less than gratitude. In fact, it appears the very college with which we have worked hard to build a lasting relationship is bent on divorcing itself from Green Street Cafe - with little regard for the impact on Northampton's cultural identity, or the devastating consequences for two small business owners.
In 2004, Smith College said they would have to relocate Green Street Cafe. That same year, the college ceased doing business with the restaurant - putting an end to our work providing catered meals for college functions, hosting private parties and dinner engagements.
Two years later, Smith offered us $65,000 to relocate Green Street Cafe - far below the true moving costs of about $300,000. In 2007, as work began on the college's $100 million Ford Hall building, we were forced to close because Smith College had been lax in keeping the cafe's building up to code. The financial damage was irrevocable. And it would only be through the tremendous goodwill of our patrons, vendors and community supporters that we reopened. Loyal diners purchased $12,000 worth of pre-paid dinners. Our plumber advanced us $8,000 worth of materials and labor, while our restaurant supply house advanced us credit to replace deteriorating equipment. Our food suppliers were equally generous. Even the IRS and Massachusetts Department of Revenue were accommodating to our efforts to get back up and running.
Over the past 24 months, however, Smith College has forced us to accept a "take it or leave it" offer of $50,000 for relocation and mitigation, while so far reneging on a pledge to make repairs to our building. The amount of personal savings we have liquidated and debt we have taken on is crushing. And the terms of our lease - through 2012 - do not allow any hope for paying down those obligations.
Most recently, Smith College has tried to force us to sign agreements to turn over our 16 parking spaces and an outdoor garden dining area for the entrance to the Ford Hall project. Smith President Carol Christ has publicly promised to keep us whole, but the actions of the college tell a different story.
Indeed, it appears that the Green Street Cafe - for so long an important fixture of the Northampton dining and cultural scene - faces death from a thousand cuts by Smith College.
But this doesn't have to happen. Not if the community feels Green Street Cafe is important enough to be allowed to survive.
The issues we have with Smith can be worked out. It just requires the willingness of the college to share responsibility for resolving them.
John Sielski and James Dozmati are the owners of Green Street Cafe.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved