A lone tenant stands strong against illegal hotels

By Chris Lombardi

Chelsea Now first met Maryanne Marinac on a subfreezing day in January, at a rally called by the Illegal Hotels Working Group to bring attention to the problem of residential buildings being converted into transient hotels. Since then, Marinac and her husband have become semi-famous as the “last tenants standing” at 160 W. 24th St., which was built in 1950 as The Chelsea and, since 2004, has boasted an awning with the name Marriott ExecuStay. Marinac sat down with us on Tuesday to talk about how she went from a young mother puzzled at all the tourists in her building to someone willing to fight City Hall and major global corporations.

This week you have yet another court date, as you fight the third legal action aimed at evicting you. You’re the last non-transient tenant left in the building. Why do you keep fighting?

All the reporters ask us that. Where else is there? I was born just south of here. This is my home.

You were pregnant with your son Brando when the first tourists started arriving. He’s 3 years old now. Does he have an idea about all this?

When reporters call, when TV cameras come, he asks, “Why are these people here?” I say it’s because the people who own this building are doing some very bad, illegal things and making people like us move away, and we need people to know about it.

At first, you were not alone in fighting this. For a while, you said, there was sort of an unnamed tenants association.

After the big conversion in 2004, when they put up the awning and issued keycards, there was this informal group of tenants who would meet. We would all do research and share it, and talk about the strangers coming in and out. There was this one guy, I remember, who was very vocal, who was, like, “You can’t do this!” Then one day he was just…gone.

What kind of information were you all collecting?

We looked up the travel Websites, called the phone numbers and made reservations. We made reservations online and kept the confirmation emails. We recorded the phone conversations with the reservation agents. We looked into the ownership records, which were pretty screwed up.

So, you were the source of those 20-odd violations filed with the Department of Buildings for “illegal use”?

We filed complaints with D.H.C.R [the state Department of Housing and Community Renewal] and the D.OB. Someone at D.O.B. did tell me, in 2004, that they already had a task force looking into reports like this all over the city. But at first, all they did here was fine the owners a few hundred dollars, and nothing would change.

Meanwhile, we were also learning about the owners, which was a story in itself. In 1986, Michael Lazar and Samuel Pompa held this building in the incorporated name of Palo Alto Operating Corp. There is a deed in 1986, where they sell the building to themselves, and then the incorporated name became Seventh Chelsea Associates LLC. Both were later arrested in a major 1986 RICO case involving the Taxi and Postal Commissions. In 2001, Lazar sold this building to Pine Equity, owned by the British Maidman family, and their affiliated company, Townhouse Management, for $63 million.

By the time you moved in, Townhouse was already here, with one main goal in mind: to empty the building of all its rent-stabilized tenants. After our story about you in February, a former tenant told BlogChelsea that, in 2001, “all the tenants at the Chelsea were told our leases would not be renewed one month before our leases were up, and we would have to look for new housing.”

There was this attorney for Townhouse Management who used to sit in the lobby all the time. He went knocking on doors, talking to tenants, trying to get them to agree to move. Meanwhile, his company was filing action after useless action, until people couldn’t afford the lawyer fees and just left.

Other tenants, I heard, got bigger buyout offers. Some said they even got down payments to go buy a place somewhere. But some of that’s just rumor.

By then, Townhouse had leased the property to Marriott International for “use as corporate housing.” A now-deleted page from the company’s Website boasted that its general counsel “spearheaded Townhouse’s delivery of units to Marriott’s ExecuStay in Chelsea, including the vacating of more than 175 units.”

Marriott’s not just using it for corporate housing. If you go to a NYC & CO tourist kiosk, my building is right there on its list of great hotels. They come from China, from Europe, from Russia—students, actors, little old ladies from Alabama. Just this morning, I saw two of those getting out of a taxi, one saying [soft drawl], “What’s the room number on our reservation?”

When did the management start the actions against you?

Right away, as soon as we went to the authorities at D.O.B. and D.H.C.R. First, they stopped repairing things. We still have bad mold, our dishwasher pumps dirty water, and they stopped painting. Then they offered us $5,000 to move out, which would barely cover moving costs, and we laughed in their faces. Then the lawyer letters started coming.

But I never knew, till I met John Raskin and the Illegal Hotels Working Group, that this was happening all over the city.

How has it been, working with elected officials and all these local advocates? Did anything change for you after the group started up last summer?

Dick Gottfried has been wonderfully supportive. He has written Marriott repeatedly, without any response, asking for a copy of Marriott’s lease with the building’s current owners, Lasalle Investment Corp. He also wrote to the U.S. Postal Service, protesting that they were handing my mail to hotel employees instead of putting it in our mailbox. And Congressman Jerrold Nadler is also intervening, because the post office is federal. And Speaker Quinn’s office has helped, too.

And last October, someone from the mayor’s office came to the building and actually seized the registry from the front desk, with all list of guests who had signed in and for which rooms. They have all our recordings and photos.

You’ve been working closely with the mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement. They took their first public steps last week, with that Upper West Side SRO [See Page 1 for story]. What are you hoping they’ll do?

They told me that lot of the lawsuits developed by HPD against illegal hotel owners have been on hold until September, when they expected those tougher city laws they promised in January to be on the books. These are criminal actions: fraud and worse.

They keep telling me there’s going to be this big lawsuit on all the buildings doing this. Part of it’s waiting for the laws to be strengthened, especially in those SROs that were once zoned for hotels. But the Chelsea, it’s not an SRO, like the ones uptown or the Breslin Hotel. This was for long-term use by ordinary people.

I still have trouble figuring out why a big corporation like the Marriott—what’s their value, $60 billion?—would get involved in something so criminal.

There’s certainly a lot of money being made.

I think this is what no one is talking about. My little old building has flipped four times on paper, its value going from $63 to $117 million in less than five years!

It’s a little dizzying. In 2004, Townhouse sold the building to Berkshire Capital Group for $93 million. In 2006, Berkshire flipped the property to LaSalle Investments, the U.S. arm of the global equity firm Jones-LaSalle, for $117 million. Lasalle then created Chelsea Commonwealth L.L.C, the entity that is now taking you to court.

It’s what’s called a “holding action,” an effort to recover the apartment. But the guy who’s supposed to appear in court against us, is in deep trouble with H.P.D. himself, because he said under oath last year that they had ceased renting to transients. But everyone knows that’s not true. Their own security cameras are capturing all the tourist traffic.

What have you learned in these years that you didn’t expect to learn? What’s been the overall effect on your health and outlook?

It’s exhausting, and has been very stressful. Especially in the beginning, at a time when I was just trying to be with my child. I have learned a lot I wish I didn’t need to know, like about real estate transactions and the amount of corruption that’s out there. But I also learned how the city works, and how to find who’s on your side.

To me, the best outcome of all this would be that somehow we get the building back, and all the 300 units become rent-stabilized units again.

It would be The Chelsea again.

We would have neighbors, like normal people. That’s what winning this fight means to me.