The Bryant Park Grill Is Fighting to Survive – DNyuz

It’s Tuesday, and we’ll look at a lease renewal for a restaurant that has been a centerpiece of Bryant Park since the 1990s. We’ll also get details on why the city’s famously delicious tap water may taste different for a while.

“Help save Bryant Park Grill,” the restaurant’s website has said imploringly for the last couple of weeks. A spokesman said the restaurant was fighting “to avoid shutting down.”

The web page amounted to a pre-emptive strike by Ark Restaurants, the company that has run the Bryant Park Grill for nearly 30 years in the park behind the New York Public Library between West 40th and 42nd Streets. The restaurant’s lease expires in eight months. The landlord and manager of the park, the nonprofit Bryant Park Corporation, says it has not made a final decision about whether to renew the lease with new terms or to bring in a different tenant.

Michael Weinstein, the chief executive of Ark Restaurants, is unhappy about the way the renewal process has been handled by the Bryant Park Corporation, which leases the restaurant space from the city and in turn leases it to Ark.

Ark said the process of renewing the operating agreement had been going on for more than 11 months, starting with the nonprofit’s issuing a request for proposals, or RFP, which is used to solicit bids from prospective vendors or tenants.

Ark said it responded to the RFP last October and was interviewed in December by three board members from the nonprofit, along with its president, Daniel Biederman, and a consultant. Ark said it then received a “pro forma license agreement” in May but had no discussions with anyone from the Bryant Park Corporation about tenancy renewal since then.

In the meantime, Weinstein said that he had heard that the Bryant Park Corporation was negotiating “in a serious way” with the celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. “That got us to say, ‘We’ve got to protect these employees and go public,’” Weinstein said. “We’ve got a lot of livelihoods at stake.”

Biederman said the corporation had issued a request for proposals, as required by the Parks Department, and had received 11 “serious applications.” Those were weeded down to seven and then to four finalists. Ark was one of the four, Biederman said, adding that officials from the two sides met four or five times between December and May.

Biederman said that Ark had been “a very good tenant” whose original lease had been extended twice since the Bryant Park Grill opened in the 1990s. But, referring to Weinstein, Biederman added, “I think he’s satisfied he may not be the winner.”

By almost all accounts, the Bryant Park Grill has figured in the continuing success of Bryant Park, 10 acres that critic Paul Goldberger called “in many ways the quintessential New York urban park.” It has a history: George Washington fought there. Edith Wharton described it. And by the 1980s, drug dealers seemed to dominate it.

“Look both ways before you enter,” the narrator in the novel “Bright Lights, Big City” cautioned in a passage about following “a kid” into the park to buy drugs: “His brother may be waiting with a baseball bat.”

A four-year, multimillion-dollar renovation that began in 1988 changed the vibe. The New Yorker magazine took note of the opening of the Bryant Park Grill in a 1995 article headlined “Miracle on 42nd Street.”

Weinstein said the Bryant Park Grill now pays roughly $3 million a year in rent. He would not say how much of an increase he had offered. Echoing the “save Bryant Park Grill” web page, the events manager, Diane Giovannone, said the restaurant had opted to cancel bookings for weddings and events scheduled to take place after the lease runs out.

Weinstein also said that the restaurant provides 250 jobs, and that many of its employees have stayed put. Giovannone said that 48 have been on the payroll for more than 25 years, 34 for 15 years and 40 for more than 10 years. And Donna Simms, the general manager, said that Ark Restaurants could not provide jobs for all of the employees if they were to leave Bryant Park.

“There’s too many of us,” she said. “There’s not enough space in the other restaurants to absorb them.”

Biederman said there was “no reason at all to expect that.”

“We don’t know for sure what the winning bidder will do” if a different operator is chosen, he said, but it was “very unlikely they’d start by hiring a whole new group of employees.”

Weather

Expect clouds, with a high near 70. Tonight, clouds persist, with a chance of showers and a low around 60.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Thursday (Rosh Hashana).

The latest Metro news

Major Eric Adams

• Seeking dismissal of charges: Lawyers for Mayor Eric Adams argued that the conduct described in the five-count indictment against him did not meet the definition of bribery. A series of Supreme Court rulings has made it more difficult to bring bribery prosecutions against public officials.

• Adams’s successor sent back gold tea sets: Antonio Reynoso, who succeeded Adams as the Brooklyn borough president, said he had declined or returned gifts from Turkey. He also said he had met with FBI officials to discuss overtures from foreign nationals.

Other news

How a temporary tunnel shutdown may affect the taste of tap water

New York City’s tap water doesn’t have a slogan like “Earth’s finest water” — but it is known for being delicious.

It might taste a bit differently for a while.

Starting this week, less of the water in the city will come from the watershed that normally provides about 90 percent of what the city drinks, washes dishes with and bathes in. Another watershed will make up the difference, but the taste may not be what New Yorkers are accustomed to.

“Just like different brands of bottled water taste a bit different, so do our different reservoirs,” Rohit Aggarwala, the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the city’s water supply, said in a statement.

Behind the taste change is the temporary shutdown of the Delaware Aqueduct in the Catskill Mountains for eight months for repairs. That will mean the loss of the Delaware portion of the Catskill/Delaware watershed, which is spread across five rural counties in New York State and is the largest unfiltered water supply in the United States.

To make up the difference, the city will turn to its other water source, known as the Croton Watershed. Croton water isn’t as clean as Catskill-Delaware water, because the Croton Watershed is closer to developed areas in suburban counties north of New York City.

Croton water contains more drainage and discharge and must be filtered, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But the Croton Water Filtration Plant in the Bronx will be able to handle only about a quarter of what the city needs. So some unfiltered Croton water will be mixed with what is flowing in from the Catskills, at about a 1-to-3 ratio.

The technique is called “blending” and can be controversial, Sarah Meyland, a water expert based in Huntington, NY, said.

“If you are mixing high-quality water with less-than-the-best water, the concentrations will be diluted in the supply,” she said. “But that’s not to say you won’t have exposure to whatever is in the Croton water.”

The repairs are part of a $2 billion project to plug leaks in a 2.5-mile section of the Delaware Aqueduct. The idea is to keep from losing up to 35 million gallons of water a day. The city has built a bypass tunnel around the leaky stretch. The plan is to connect that tunnel to the leaking part of the aqueduct near Newburgh, NY, and then to seal it off — while also repairing another leak in Ulster County.

METROPOLITAN diary

Love is all around

Dear Diary:

It was a Saturday morning in late summer. I had run out to buy bread and was walking home on Sixth Avenue in Park Slope.

At Carroll Street, a construction worker was redirecting traffic away from the block, closed for roadwork.

“I love you, lady,” he said as I passed him.

“I love you too,” I replied.

“Hey, you really meant that!” he said, sounding surprised.

“I really did,” I said, a little surprised myself.

“I can tell,” he said. “I’m an empath.”

I kept walking, my bag of bread bouncing lightly against my side.

—MJ Babic

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

PS Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at (email protected).

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