PICKED CLEAN: Harlem’s Lenox Lounge is the focus of a $50 million suit after the former operator allegedly had thugs remove the club’s famed fixtures. (Splash News)
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It could have been a scene from “American Gangster.”
In the early-morning darkness of New Year’s Day, hired thugs posing as cops warned the landlord of Harlem’s historic Lenox Lounge not to intervene as the shuttered club’s former operator allegedly gutted it of its original art deco fixtures and iconic zebra-striped walls, a lawsuit alleges.
Landlord Ricky Edmonds, 56, this week slapped former Lenox Lounge operator Alvin Reed, 73, with a $50 million Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit for the Jan. 1 stunt.
“The ‘police,’ who had some type of shield hanging from their necks, informed Mr. Edmonds that if he intervened, he would be arrested and carted off to jail,” the suit states.
After Reed’s workers had carted away most of the goods, the lawsuit alleges, the “police” reportedly admitted they were actually security hired by Reed’s attorney, Tyreta Foster.
Longtime Harlem resident Reed ran the jazz joint, which hosted greats like Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, for 30 years. He was forced out Jan. 1 when he couldn’t pay the rent, which had skyrocketed from $3,000 a month in 1996 to $10,000 a month in 2012.
Reed, who took the goods a few blocks north to the site of his planned new club, is prevented from selling or otherwise altering the iconic items until the case is concluded, a Manhattan judge ruled at a hearing yesterday.
In December, Page Six reported that Nobu guru Richie Notar plans to reopen the nightclub at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street this spring. It’s rumored Robert De Niro will be involved in the project.
The lounge has been featured in films from the 2000 remake of “Shaft” to 2007’s “American Gangster,” where 1970s drug kingpin Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, meets rival Nicky Barnes, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., in the famed Zebra Room.
The 29-foot-by-6-foot bar “was sawn off from adjacent walls at each end,” four square yards of zebra wallpaper were “vandalized” and “165 dime-store ashtrays used as ceiling decorative elements,” were torn from their fixtures, according to court papers.
“The once proud Lenox Lounge, for the first time since its founding in 1939, stood completely bare and empty,” Edmonds, who’s owned the property since 1983, says in the documents.
The court fight revolves around the seemingly simple question: What’s a fixture? Edmonds asserts in the lawsuit that Reed stripped the haunt of a long list of etched mirrors, glass shelving, light covers, interior doors and red-metal paneling.
Reed insists the property belongs to him.
“My client actually owns most of the property inside the Lenox Lounge,” attorney Tyreta Foster told Judge Anil Singh in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday. “The things that were affixed remain,” she insisted, claiming, “The bar was not a fixture. The bar was removable.”
Judge Singh said the question would be settled in court. “It’s going to be an issue, what’s a fixture, what’s not a fixture,” he said. “That’s what it’s going to come down to.”
The parties return next month.