To the editors:
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Unfortunately, I was unable to respond to the inaccuracies in Lewis Lazare’s [July 21] Culture Club piece regarding HotHouse earlier but I had my hands full moving and relocating HotHouse, an endeavor hampered by the miscasting of our business as tenant deadbeats. However for the record it is important to dispel the damaging falsehoods left to stand in his piece. The assertion that we are moving because we are unable to pay the rent, “balked” at paying additional charges or that we asked Ms. Berger to “finance” our business contains a biased reading of the dispute. Sure we resist extortion of a bogus $28,000 in added claims contested by us and our attorneys. But so do the other numerous tenants of the Flat Iron Building that have ongoing lawsuits against Berger Realty, who have similarly been presented with exorbitant unitemized bills. Whether Berger calls these “pass through” charges or whatever other convenient name she has for it, the fact remains that upon repeated requests both by myself and my attorney, those charges were never justified. Additionally to claim that Andrews and Lubinski never collected those fees from former tenants is a fantastic rewriting of the contents of the lease agreements and history. The assertion that HotHouse was nine months in arrears in rent is a patent lie closely resembling libel. As part of their predetermined plan to flip the building and evict HotHouse, Berger refused acceptance of payment of these sums then staked the claim that they were unpaid. This kind of distortion of the facts, whether bracketed by quotation marks or on their own, creates in the public mind an impression damaging to our business and reputation and in the very least deserved confirmation by the Reader. Again for the record, after six years of occupancy in the Flat Iron Building, HotHouse has paid in excess of $100,000 in rents and other charges (about a third of the total price of the building when it was sold to Berger) and upon leaving was $1,000.00 in arrears, a point worth reiterating as it needs a context.
Thirdly, there is a mean-spirited underlying implication in the piece that artists and arts organizations do not want to play by the same “hard-nosed” business rules as everyone else. As an employer of 16 part-time workers, operating a small business that has an annual budget of $400,000 that additionally pays out to musicians and other artists about half of that, we are as aware of the bottom line as anyone.
When queried by reporters as to whether Subcommandante Marcos (of the EZLN army in Mexico) was gay, he replied, “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysdio, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post Cold War era, an artist without a gallery or portfolio, a pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on a Saturday night in any city in Mexico, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 PM, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker, a dissident amid free-market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico.”
