WANDER AIMLESSLY through the genteel corridors of the West Village and take note of the more ramshackle buildings. Chances are they belong to Mr. Bender. There’s the chartreuse two-story at the corner of Greenwich and Gansevoort, with a ground floor filled by Italian eatery Nero D’Avola; the two-story industrial building that looks like an old meat processing plant at 52 Gansevoort, which on Sunday bore a rusted metal awning like a stained visor against the beating rain, while its wood-paneled neighbor next door, the Griffin Club, positively bellowed wealth; the lovely and neglected triangular Northern Dispensary, bounded by Waverly Place and Grove and Christopher streets, empty now for more than a decade; the historic Keller Hotel, at Barrow and West streets, built in 1898 to house sailors.
It’s anybody’s guess what designs, if any, Mr. Bender has for the Gottlieb estate. Estranged family members, surely driven by their own self-interest (though they present themselves as more community-minded), describe a landlord who is diminishing the value of his uncle’s hard-won estate. Tenants describe a landlord who is even more unresponsive to their needs than his predecessors. Real estate professionals describe a landlord who doesn’t return phone calls and who conducts business out of his attorneys’ office.
At the end of September, when The Observer first contacted Mr. Bender, he agreed to be interviewed a month and a half hence. He backed out the week of his scheduled interview. That did not come as a surprise: “Virtually everybody I know who has wanted to have interactions with Neil has been unable to,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
“Neil is pretty much an absentee landlord,” said one of his residential tenants, who asked to remain unnamed. “At first he was there all the time. Now you can’t even get into the office at 544 Hudson Street. It’s sealed up like Fort Knox.”
“It’s just impossible to reach him for anything,” said a resident of 103 Greenwich Avenue, the storefront of which used to house Dayo Restaurant and now sits empty. “The building is falling into disrepair.”
Mr. Bender, phantasmagorical though he may be, does exist. Joey Wang, the manager of Baby Buddha restaurant at 753 Washington Street, has seen him. For what it’s worth.
“Bill [Gottlieb], we talked to him and he sent people right away to fix things,” Ms. Wang said. Under Mr. Bender, not so much. First, Mr. Bender declined to renew Ms. Wang’s lease and instead had her pay by the month. Then, he cut off roof access, so that Ms. Wang couldn’t have the chimney cleaned. Now, in the middle of one of the worst real estate downturns in decades, with vacant storefronts proliferating in the Village like rotten teeth, he’s asked Ms. Wang to leave by Jan. 31.
“It’s like they’re trying to turn the neighborhood into a slum,” said Gina Shamus, a Westbeth Artists Housing resident who gathered with a number of other local patrons inside the restaurant on Sunday to protest the eatery’s pending eviction.
“An upscale slum,” said fellow patron Eve Zanni.
“Bill Gottlieb kept the storefronts full,” said Mae Gamble. “He may not have kept them up, but they were full.”
“And he kept rents moderate,” she added.
Indeed, while Gottlieb was often accused of neglecting his buildings during the real estate boom-earning him the moniker the accidental preservationist-many of his former tenants remember him quite fondly (perhaps influenced by what was to follow). Among them is Keith McNally, whose famed restaurant Pastis is housed in a Gottlieb estate building at Nine Ninth Avenue: “Despite Bill Gottlieb being highly idiosyncratic, once he was committed to you, he was, in my opinion, a fantastic landlord.”
