Tag: real estate

For more than 50 years, Jimmy’s Corner, a small dive bar founded by famed boxing trainer and cutman Jimmy Glenn, has been an iconic fixture of Times Square in New York City. It’s a popular watering hole for office workers, sports fans, and tourists. Its walls are crowded with boxing photographs and memorabilia, including images of Glenn pictured alongside Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, evidence of a long career spent moving through premier gyms and fight nights. For many New Yorkers, Jimmy’s Corner has been a reliable refuge in a neighborhood defined by reinvention, a place that remained constant while Times Square transformed around it.

But five years after Jimmy Glenn died and passed the bar to his son, Adam, the small business is getting pushed out of its location by one of the largest commercial real estate owners in New York City. The bar is now locked in a messy legal battle, and the situation holds a stark lesson for small business owners. 

In May, Adam Glenn says his landlord, the Durst Organization, a New York real estate dynasty owned by the Durst family, told him it had a buyer for the building—and that a termination letter would follow, requiring the business to move by mid-July. 

To Adam Glenn, the most upsetting aspect was the time frame. “August 18 is Jimmy Glenn Day in the city—it’s my dad’s birthday,” he says. “We celebrate at the bar. I said there’s no way I’m going to agree to get out before August 18.”

New York City’s designation of “Jimmy Glenn Day,” bestowed in 2022, Adam Glenn says, reflected his father’s reach beyond a single business and beyond the Black-owned family operation he built. The future of that legacy now rests on a legal dispute.

On December 4, Jimmy’s Corner filed suit in New York State Supreme Court. The complaint challenges the landlord’s attempt to terminate the lease based on a death-related clause contained in an earlier lease modification. The bar argues that the elder Glenn, who signed the lease at age 80, never knowingly agreed to such a term and that later negotiations established a different framework for termination.

The Durst Organization says in a statement to Inc., “The Durst family had a personal relationship with the bar’s original owner, Jimmy, going back 50 years.” It says it supported the bar for decades, including by providing extremely favorable rent. “My dad originally befriended the Dursts when he protected Seymour Durst from a mugging in Times Square decades ago,” says Glenn. 

The Durst Organization also says that after Jimmy Glenn’s death, the company decided to sell the building and “went above and beyond our lease obligations due to the personal relationship with Jimmy,” telling Adam Glenn more than a year ago that the bar would have to vacate, offering him $250,000 to relocate, and allowing the bar to remain open longer. Glenn disputes that characterization and its timing, including how much notice he was given and what obligations the lease required. In his telling, the dispute was not about money but about time: how long the business would have to plan a future elsewhere, particularly given that the lease is set to run through 2029.

For entrepreneurs—particularly retail and hospitality operators whose businesses are tied to a single address—Adam Glenn says that, “The case shows how handshake agreements and trust in lease negotiations are great for good times, but it’s important to keep in mind the boxing adage, ‘Protect yourself at all times’ for cases when a landlord’s priorities change.”

Reading the Fine Print

At the center of the dispute is a narrow but consequential question: which lease provision governs the landlord’s right to terminate the tenancy.

Adam Glenn says the relevant language appears in a lease amendment negotiated in 2019, after he had joined the business, when the parties extended the lease through 2029 and added a “demolition clause.” That provision, he says, was intended to govern any termination tied to redevelopment, development, or sale of the property, and required advance notice and a termination payment.

“Under the formula in our lease, if the landlord wanted to terminate this way, they would owe us roughly $175,000 and give at least six months’ notice,” Glenn says, adding that the initial termination letter in May made no reference to those terms.

According to Glenn, after his initial refusal to leave with less than six months’ notice and no payment, the landlord proposed a $250,000 payment and a considerably shorter timeline. “I reluctantly agreed to the deal on the understanding that there was a buyer in place and the building was being sold,” Glenn says. “I told Durst that if they could secure more time for us with the buyer, I would forgo the payment.”

But he refused to agree without a deal in place for the building. “I said that without a sale, we should be able to stay. That’s when they turned to the death clause and issued a new termination notice requiring us to leave by November 30,” he says.

The court filing argues that any such provision tied to Jimmy Glenn’s death is unenforceable, including on grounds that the founder—who, according to the filing, had no formal education beyond seventh grade—did not understand the legal effect of the document he signed and was not advised by counsel. The filing places that claim within the context of a decades-long relationship built on personal trust between the families.

That generational contrast runs through the case. Adam Glenn, 44, graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney before leaving his job to run the bar. Although his father relied on personal relationships and handshake understandings, Adam Glenn has come to approach the conflict as a matter of ethics and contract interpretation.

From Private Dispute to Public Outcry

Within days of the lawsuit’s filing, the conflict drew attention from several New York publications, and local television stations. Adam Glenn has also used Instagram Live to speak directly to followers, sharing his account of negotiations and the bar’s future. Supporters have rallied on social media and in person, framing Jimmy’s as a long-running institution under pressure in what is now one of the city’s most valuable commercial corridors.

The legal complaint from Jimmy’s Corner also alleges discriminatory treatment. It claims the landlord attempted termination after complaints about Black patrons. It asserts that routine sidewalk behavior by Black patrons—such as stepping outside to smoke—was documented and escalated while similar conduct by white patrons was not. The Durst Organization did not respond to a request for comment on those allegations.

Glenn says he received photographs, phone calls, and messages from building management portraying the bar as a problem tenant. He responded by addressing what he could control, including installing a camera. After that, he says, the complaints stopped. 

According to independent analyst Alejandro Agustín Ortiz, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U.’s Racial Justice Program, civil-rights claims often turn on patterns rather than isolated incidents. “When people are engaged in the same lawful behavior, but documentation or enforcement consistently focuses on one group and not others,” Ortiz says, “that’s the type of pattern lawyers examine.” In cases involving alleged discrimination, Ortiz adds, written records often determine how patterns of conduct are evaluated over time.

When Time Changes Meaning

The case, which is still ongoing, shows what happens when a handshake relationship becomes a legal fight. Lease provisions that were never discussed—termination rights, notice periods, what happens when an owner dies—suddenly determine whether a business survives.

“Durst wouldn’t act this way with their tenants renting 40 floors,” Adam Glenn says. “But in a situation with this kind of power imbalance, they’re acting as if the usual rules of decency and business don’t apply.”

At its core, this dispute turns on inheritance: of a livelihood, a legacy, and agreements made under different conditions, by different people, with different expectations. Time once reinforced continuity and trust between Jimmy’s Corner and the Durst Organization, but in this dispute, it’s become the point of greatest pressure.

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