The owner of a shuttered Greenwich Village pub that dates back to the Prohibition Era says a lawsuit filed by neighbors claiming his planned reopening would turn their quiet block into an alleyway of loud drunks is ridiculous given that the watering hole operated at the same location for 85 years before it was forced to shut down due to structural damage.
“There’s some exaggeration and hyperbole about what we’re trying to accomplish,” Chumley’s operator Jim Miller told The Post. “We’re the same village people that were there before. We’re woven into the fabric of Greenwich Village.”
Miller, a retired firefighter who tended bar at the storied speakeasy in the 1990s, noted, “We’ve occupied that corner for 80 plus years.”
Chumley’s — at 86 Bedford St. ever since it opened in 1922 — was a favorite haunt of literary giants from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Norman Mailer.
It closed in 2007 after a portion of the building’s facade collapsed and Miller, 45, has battled city agencies for the past seven years to obtain necessary approvals to bring the bar back to life.
A coalition of homeowners who call themselves “Bar Free Bedford” sued on Feb. 24 to block the historic pub’s planned reopening in six months, saying the establishment had turned into a magnate for “bridge-and-tunnel partygoers” before it closed.
Miller, a married father of three, insisted the characterization was unfair.
“We’re not going to be operating a club — this isn’t Varick St.”
Miller has already worked with locals to cut back his hours and expand seating inside, but he fears the disgruntled neighbors will only be happy with the bar’s demise.
“You open the paper every day and something beloved and historical in this city is shutting down and I don’t want that to happen here,” he said.
He invited the 48 plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court to settle their gripes the old-fashioned way.
“If you have concerns please come and talk to us,” Miller said. “It makes no sense to us as a business to alienate the neighborhood that we occupy.”