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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
City Hall
New York, NY 10007
Phone: 311 or 212-New-York
Fax: 212.788.2460
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Club owner Hilly Kristal said the dispute dated from 2001, when the landlord presented a $300,000 bill for unpaid rent.

Though most of that has now been repaid, the club was handed another bill earlier this year for $76,000 which CBGB has not paid. The club's lease comes to an end in August and talks on renewal are stalled.

"The real thing is they don't want me back," Kristal said, adding that there had been a series of disagreements over renovations and building certificates in recent years.

CBGB, which stands for "country, bluegrass and blues" even though it is most famous for punk music, rents its downtown space from the Bowery Residents' Committee -- a non-profit organization that runs a homeless shelter above the premises.

"I am not going to subsidize CBGB at the expense of homeless people," Muzzy Rosenblatt, executive director for the organization, was quoted as saying in The New York Times.

MTV's Web site quoted him as saying CBGB had not met its obligations on safety.

The Committee wants to double the rent and negotiations over a new lease have ground to a halt amid legal wrangling that will result in a court hearing later this month.

Kristal, who founded the club in 1973, converting what had been a Hell's Angels hangout into one of the most famous venues for live music in the city, said he would fight closure of what he called a New York City institution.

"We've established something here. ... This is a kind of symbol of helping young musicians and new artists," he said, recalling early gigs by the likes of Pearl Jam.

"I think we do a nice thing for a lot of people; maybe it's not quite as wonderful as helping the homeless but it has its benefits," Kristal said.

Rosenblatt could not be immediately reached for comment.

But the irony is that the greedy landlord poised to uproot CB's is not some condo-crazed speculator but the Bowery Residents' Committee—a 34-year-old homeless-services agency.

Gentrified by the homeless? Now there's a twist.

And now CBGB is in danger of being evicted for failing to pay more than $75,000 to BRC, which runs a shelter and a drop-in center upstairs from the club.

On February 17, the not-for-profit issued a "notice of default" ordering the punk landmark to pay up or face summary eviction.

CBGB owner Hilly Kristal contends he was paying faithfully, but blames the BRC for not notifying him of annual rent increases in the club's 12-year lease. He points to a pair of December 2003 invoices amounting to less than $1,300. "If we owed all this money, why didn't they say something then?"

Kristal says he can pay in full, but is holding off under the advice of his lawyer. Back rent, he feels, may be the only foothold he has on the 31-year-old venue, whose lease is up at the end of August. "My position is, give me 10 more years at a rate we can pay, and I'll get you the money now," says the 73-year-old from his cramped "office," a pair of old metal desks jammed in the club's entryway and plastered with the stickers of just about every band that has ever passed through. Kristal can't afford to stay if BRC doubles his rent to as much as $40,000 a month, which is what he claims the agency quoted him last spring.

BRC executive director Muzzy Rosenblatt says the increase was never firm, but as of now, lease renewal isn't even on the table: "Why should I negotiate a new lease if he's still not complying with the existing one?"

The two sides are due in court on March 14.

Just how CBGB ended up being a subtenant of a homeless shelter speaks to the vagaries of the Bowery itself.

In 1973, when Kristal took over the storefront of the Palace Hotel, an infamous flophouse at 315 Bowery, he leased directly from the owners. Kristal considered buying the building in the early '90s, when the Bowery was swimming in crack, but couldn't afford the roughly $4 million price tag. "I never had that kind of money," says Kristal, who still lives in a tiny rent-stabilized apartment around the corner. (He says he only really started to turn a profit in recent years through CBGB Fashions, which sells t-shirts and other club merchandise.)

So the owners turned over management of the building, along with neighboring 317 Bowery, to the BRC, with a 45-year net lease on both properties. Kristal speculates the owners settled on the long-term lease with BRC because it was the only way to rid themselves of troublesome SRO tenants. "I don't think anyone else but another homeless group could have dealt with it," he says.

Kristal was given a 12-year sublease and says he remained "friendly" with BRC until 2000, when the management informed him that CBGB was more than $300,000 in arrears. Kristal blames both his own and the BRC's slack accounting: "We used to bring the checks upstairs but then they told us to stop doing that. But then they never came to pick them up, or billed us, or anything."

Rosenblatt, who took over as director in 2000, disputes this claim but concedes his agency dropped the ball. "We're not a commercial landlord," he says of BRC, which has evolved into a $30 million-a-year homeless-services provider managing 23 programs in the city.

After a seven-month court battle, CBGB was ordered to pay roughly $223,000 in monthly installments. Then an October 2003 inspection by the city landed CBGB with a big stack of building and fire code violations. Rosenblatt says Kristal's response was lax, and both the owners and BRC filed suit.

Kristal claims he immediately called an architect for help, installing flame-retardant curtains, fire-safe doors, and such. "Anything that had to do with safety, I fixed within a week," he maintains. The issue is still being litigated, though Kristal faults the BRC for failing to answer its own violations.

BRC can hardly claim to be a perfect landlord. Kristal claims that for three years, 315 Bowery had no furnace; the club had to make do with small electric heaters. The club has also contended with BRC's clients harassing patrons and panhandling out front.

It's hard to conceive of many businesses other than the doggedly downscale CB's that could handle living below a 24-hour drop-in center, where police and ambulances are called in regularly. Yet Rosenblatt says he's fed up with Kristal: "I'm not going to subsidize a for-profit nightclub. The money I should be using to help homeless people I'm having to pay to lawyers just to get Hilly to meet his obligations."

But with MTV calling and bands ready to battle for the club, the backlash from moving to evict this downtown institution could cost a lot more.

But the venue is not ready to surrender without a struggle.

"I want to fight for it," said founder Hilly Kristal, whose rent stands to double what it is now. "It's up to people to speak out. What we do is important - we directly benefit the community and the city."

The club's landlord, the Bowery Residence Committee, has proposed charging CBGB $55 per square foot for the space on their ground floor and $25 per square foot for the basement area.

This brings the rent up to about $38,000-$40,000 a month, compared to the $20,000 the club currently pays. This increase, coupled with an $80,000 annual liability insurance fee, would make it impossible to afford, Kristal said.

The Bowery Resident Committee is a nonprofit organization that aids the homeless, drug and alcohol addicts, and HIV-infected community residents. It has occupied the space above CBGB for as long as the club has been there.

University officials denied rumors that NYU is considering buying the space if CBGB is unable to pay its rent.

"I am unaware that the space is for sale, and the university has had no conversations with the [Bowery Residence Committee] about buying or leasing the space," university spokesman John Beckman wrote in an e-mail.

CBGB has occupied its location on the Bowery between First and Second Streets for 32 years. Although its name stands for Country Bluegrass Blues, it quickly became synonymous with the emerging punk and rock scenes.

When the club opened, with a $600 monthly rent, Kristal made it his goal to attract the most original talent and made it a rule that bands could only perform their own music. Shows still rarely cost more than $7-10, and the acts can audition to get gigs if they haven't recorded a demo, unlike at most New York City clubs.

NYU students who have played with their bands at the club were incredulous at the possibility of the venue closing down.

"It really surprises me," said CAS sophomore Nic Vascocu, who played at the CBGB Gallery in October. "It's so much of a landmark."

Other students felt that money issues should not bring about the venue's downfall.

"There's no good reason to close it," said Steinhardt sophomore Tom Schecter, who fronts the rock band Dibble Edge. He said the show his band played at CBGB this January was "probably the coolest show I've ever played in my life."

The only way for the club to continue to run would be to increase admission or charge a lot more for drinks, Kristal said, neither of which he is willing to do.

"I'm not in this to make a lot of money," he said. "The most important goal is to give people a chance to perform - I'm not going to overcharge."

Schecter said the club's prices are a large part of its appeal.

"People don't want to pay more than $6 or $7 to see a show," he said. He added that CBGB's policy of admitting people aged 16 and over is a major draw for the club. "With two days' notice, we were able to get 100 people to come to our show, and it was easy because it was cheap, and everyone could get in. I'm not 21, and a lot of my friends aren't, either."

Tisch sophomore Brian Chamberlain said the biggest potential loss with the closing of CBGB would be the loss of recognizing new talent. It's the only venue his band, Molloy, has played at, he said.

"You'd be losing bands in their really early stages and those really raw bands," he said. "Especially good, local bands."

Kristal, who still puts in 50- to 55-hour weeks at his club, said that people don't realize the impact CBGB has.

"Since 2000, more bands have probably been signed out of here than in the '70s," he said. "We help these kids out as much as we can."

The club is currently shown in New York City's commercials designed to attract the 2012 Olympic games, he added.

Vascocu anticipates a response to save the club similar to the campaign to save The Bottom Line last year, when NYU demanded over $185,000 in back rent from the popular venue on West 4th Street. Although celebrities pitched in at the last minute to save the facility, it was economically impossible for the club to continue operating under NYU.

"It's huge," Vascocu said. "I don't see people letting this close down."

But Schecter acknowledges that CBGB faces tough odds. With respect to clubs like The Bottom Line and, more recently, Manhattan's Fez Under Time Cafe and Luna Lounge, he said chances for CBGB are not good.

"These places ... they're becoming disappearing acts," he said.

Kristal, for one, is gearing up to protest, although he said that if people in the community and neighborhood feel strongly about it, they are the ones who need to campaign to the Bowery Residence Committee's Board of Directors.

"Maybe people don't care if we're gone - but I think that they will," he said. "And I'll do what I have to do to fight this. I'm not leaving until they come and board the doors."

We're talking of course about CBGB, which, as WSN reported yesterday, is facing the prospect of having to close its doors in a few months if the club's landlord - the Bowery Resident Committee - goes through with its proposal to double rent prices to the $40,000 per month range.

While we respect and applaud the committee for its excellent work aiding the community's homeless and substance abusers, we hope that they'll reconsider this move, and that NYU will use its resources to arbitrate between the two to ensure CBGB keeps its home. At the very least, NYU can go on record supporting the club's contributions to the music world over the years, and expressing a desire for it to remain where it is.

Unlike the situation with The Bottom Line, in which the affected club was a tenant of the university itself, NYU has no proprietary or financial relationship with CBGB. But what better way to demonstrate to the surrounding community that NYU cares than intervening when its own interests aren't at stake?

CBGB is not only a place where pioneering punk and rock acts got their start, but it's somewhere that generations of NYU students have gone to play their own music or just take in a few shows. It's an integral part of New York cultural life and part of the appeal of going to school here. While the power to determine its fate may not ultimately lie in NYU's hands, we hope that the university will do whatever it can to keep the club alive.

By the morning, though, Kristal sips a cup of coffee and pops an antacid as he considers the future of his own piece of rock history: CBGB's, the venerable birthplace of punk. After 32 years in business, the world-renowned club on the Bowery is in danger of losing its lease.

"Even at this Hall of Fame thing, people were coming up and asking, `What can we do? What can we do?'" Kristal recalls, sitting at his cramped desk just inside the club's front door. "It's very discouraging after all these years."

Kristal says the club owes $91,000 in back rent through a bookkeeping mix-up. (His landlord concurs, but still wants the money.) Come August, when its lease expires, he expects the current $19,000 monthly rent to at least double, although Kristal's landlord says there will be no new lease unless the old mess is gone.

"Show me you can meet your current obligations, and then we'll talk about new ones," says Muzzy Rosenblatt, executive director of the Bowery Residents' Committee. "His destiny is in his own hands."

Rosenblatt's group holds a 45-year lease on the building, where the agency houses 250 homeless people above the club. CBGB's is their lone commercial tenant; their rent feud dates back five years, when the committee went to court to collect more than $300,000 in back rent from the club.

The agency currently is in court trying to evict CBGB's, citing the current unpaid rent and Kristal's alleged failure to repair code violations in the legendary club. Kristal is battling on both fronts.

"I'm energized," says the gray-bearded owner. "I'm going to fight."

For fans of the dank storefront bar, its demise would mean the demolition of the Empire Punk Building.

"I consider it a historic place," says Tommy Ramone, drummer in one of the club's most enduring bands. "It would be like losing a landmark of sorts, you know?"

The confectioner is introducing the $25 CBGBs Punk Rock Box, a 16-piece truffle collection that includes a postage-paid petition to save CBGB, a steel logo keychain and a collection of CBGB stickers.

For the budget-minded yet concerned punk, there are $3 CBGB Retro Bars wrapped in a limited-edition CBGB keepsake package that includes the postage-paid petition. Both items will be available in May, but can be pre-ordered through the store's Web site or by calling 800-481-2462. All proceeds will benefit the club's campaign to keep its doors open.

CBGB owner Hilly Kristal is embroiled in a dispute with the nonprofit Bowery Residents' Committee, which owns the club's East Village building and operates a homeless shelter above it. In addition to back rent, Kristal's negotiations with the BRC to extend his lease past its August expiration have stalled over the subject of a substantial rent increase.

Reuters/Billboard