What a night! Allan Pepper savors the memory. Stevie Wonder, Dr. John and Johnny Winter electrified the stage at the February 1974 debut of the Bottom Line cabaret. And the likes of Mick Jagger, Bette Midler, Charles Mingus and Carly Simon added their bit of stardust to the audience.
Miles Davis played the Bottom Line. Bruce Springsteen hit the big time there. Nearly everyone, from Little Richard to Tony Bennett, including the Police, Elvis Costello, Whitney Houston, k.d. lang, Dizzy Gillespie, Taj Mahal, Norah Jones, Prince, Alicia Keys, at one time or another in the last 30 years appeared at the Bottom Line.
“I’m very proud,” said Pepper, a founder and co-owner. But the club’s long history is just about over. Revenue ran low, rent went unpaid, and the landlord finally said: Enough!
One of a pair of music-obsessed best friends from Brooklyn who created and nurtured their dream of a nightclub, Pepper now awaits the arrival of city marshals who are to slap an eviction notice on the club’s door. A New York civil court judge has ordered it.
The landlord, New York University, is intent upon it. And Greenwich Village, where the intimate 400-seat club has been a musical mainstay, is gripped by the drama of this struggle between two institutions: one moneyed and propertied, the other rich in musical history.
Pepper, 61, and co-owner Stanley Snadowsky are the Davids fighting a Goliath of a landlord, at least in Pepper’s view. In his aggressive campaign to win sympathy, Pepper depicts a big university gobbling up real estate and stomping on the little guy.
“This is a story basically about academic greed,” he said.
But it’s also a story about $190,000 in back rent. For years, NYU let it slide. But finally the chronic back rent escalated to a lawsuit. Attempts to negotiate a settlement and a new lease broke down in ugly allegations.
NYU announced Dec. 9 that it would proceed with the eviction; the club would have five days to vacate once the marshals arrive with the eviction notice.
John Beckman, an NYU vice president, speaks with barely restrained anger about the dispute in which the university is taking a PR drubbing.
NYU blames Pepper and Snadowsky, accusing them of negotiating in bad faith, of reneging on commitments.
“The university had no interest in seeing the Bottom Line close. We showed enormous patience and every consideration to try, within reason, to make sure that that didn’t happen,” Beckman said.
