Bottom Line: No more encores

What a night! Allan Pepper savors the memory. Stevie Wonder, Dr. John and Johnny Winter electrified the stage for 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.

Over the years, Miles played the Bottom Line. Springsteen hit the big time there. Performers from Little Richard to Tony Bennett -- including the Police, Elvis Costello, Whitney Houston, k.d. lang, Dizzy Gillespie, Taj Mahal, Suzanne Vega, Norah Jones, Prince, Alicia Keys -- at one time or another hit the Bottom Line marquee.

It has lasted 30 years.

“I’m very proud,” says Pepper. He’s one of the founders and owners, now saddened as the memories flood out during these final days in the club’s long history.

It’s just about over, and it’s been ugly. 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 his co-owner and lifelong friend Stanley Snadowsky, are the Davids fighting a Goliath of a landlord -- at least in Pepper’s view. In his aggressive campaign to win sympathy and financial support, Pepper depicts a big university gobbling up real estate and stomping on the little guy.

“This is a story basically about academic greed,” he says.

But it’s also a story about $190,000 in back rent, about a club that hit financial straits and couldn’t keep up with its obligations. 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 and a judge’s final gavel calling it curtains. NYU announced Dec. 9 that it would proceed with the eviction; the club will have five days to vacate the premises once the marshals arrive with the eviction sticker.

John Beckman, an NYU vice president, speaks with barely restrained anger about the dispute in which the university is taking a public relations drubbing. NYU has been deluged with e-mails from people hoping to save the club.

NYU blames Pepper and Snadowsky, accusing them of negotiating in bad faith, of reneging on commitments they made to resolve the rent dispute and of rushing to the court of public opinion in hopes of forcing NYU to back down.

Of the club’s many supporters, Beckman says: “Their feelings are understandable. Nobody wanted to see the Bottom Line close.... 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. But the Bottom Line frittered away every opportunity that we gave them.”

In the end, “it is not appropriate for a not-for-profit educational institution to be forced into the position of subsidizing a privately owned, for-profit nightclub.” And that, in essence, is what NYU had done since the club began to suffer financially in 2000.

After the two sides went to court in September and began negotiating a possible new lease for the club, Sirius Satellite Radio put up the $190,000 balance due on the club’s rent bill. Sirius placed it in an escrow account, to be accessed once a new lease was in place.

And here’s where it got ugly. Pepper says NYU offered an “onerous” new lease that would have increased the rent enormously.

No lease was signed. Negotiations broke down. The money raised to help the club could not be dispersed, since it was contingent upon a new lease.

“It leaves a big hole in a Greenwich Village that’s already had a lot torn out of it,” says Meg Griffin, a Sirius programmer.

Pepper and his supporters hope that somehow the club will be able to remain. But if it can’t, then at the least, said Griffin, they’d like to make it to a 30th anniversary show in February.