The Brooklyn Papers / Dennis W. Ho

The owner of the decaying building that once housed the Landmark Pub — pictured in this file photo — asked for financial assistance from neighbors who say she has avoided them for years.

Similar stories

Downtown: Duffield neighbors are hostile to the new hostel

Park Slope: Her brush with death is worth $2,750

Park Slope: Out-of-control Dodge slams corner near Landmark Pub

Brooklyn Is Angry: Slopers will rally tomorrow night against sports bar near Barclays Center

Mean Streets: The bike lane is working

Shopping: How do you like them apples? Fort Greene food co-op moves ahead

Tools

Print this story

Facebook this

Tweet this

Digg this

Del.icio.us

Email to a friend

Your name

Your email address

Recipients’ email addresses (Up to ten, separated by commas.)

The absentee landlord behind a derelict Park Slope building that once housed a legendary art bar has come out of the woodwork, asking for help from neighbors who have begged her to maintain the decaying property for years.

Rachel Nash, whose family owns the eyesore at Second Street and Seventh Avenue that was once home to the kitschy-cool Landmark Pub, says she wants to renovate the building. But before she can turn it into “affordable artist housing” and replace the long-closed watering hole with a cafe, she needs assistance from a community group she has jilted for almost a decade.

“I’ve been the victim of a predatory lender — and we need to fund raise,” Nash told Community Board 6 on Wednesday.

Nash and her family own the building outright, but she says they might lose it after she took out a loan to help cover property taxes and the lender claimed she fell behind on payments.

Neighbors and community board members, who have long complained about the building’s rotting construction shed, busted windows and graffiti, aren’t feeling philanthropic.

“It’s totally insane that she would come here for help,” said CB6 member Nica Lalli, who lives nearby. “It’s so bizarre. I just can’t believe it.”

Longtime Park Slopers remember the former Landmark Pub as a performance art bar cluttered with weird kids toys and old musical instruments run by Nash, her sister Esther, and their mother until the late 1990s.

“It was as if the Addams family or Queequeg from ‘Moby Dick’ opened a bar,” a regular told The Brooklyn Paper back then.

The bar was unpredictable in every way — even its hours, said former patron Buck Wolf.

“It was like walking into your senile old aunt’s attic,” said Wolf, who played harmonica there. “There was dust everywhere and you never knew when it would be open.”

The building is just as wacky on paper, boasting 24 unresolved Department of Buildings violations. The city has leveled tens of thousands of dollars of fines against the Nash family for numerous infractions such as failing to maintain a rickety sidewalk shed, letting the building’s chimney fall into disrepair, and not fixing loose windows, one of which fell on a car, according to neighbors.

The Nash family tried to sell the gated-up building for about $5.5 million in 2006, but it didn’t work and the bar never re-opened.

Since then, CB6 members have repeatedly tried to track down the landlords in hopes of convincing them to fix up the property, which occupies a prime piece of real estate on the retail stretch.

Board members were shocked to see Nash at the hearing, but claim they are more concerned with fixing the “significant blight” than planning a fundraiser to save it, saying the sisters’ disappearing-then-returning act makes them seem unreliable and out of touch.

The Nash sisters — who recently opened a small gallery space on the side of the building — say they want to renovate the Landmark Pub and turn it into a cafe with “poetry nights.”

They also want to showcase emerging artists, such as cartoonists, and convert the second floor into residential units, claiming they have tried to get a contractor to do repairs.

“We’re gonna fix it up and make it pretty,” Esther Nash said. “It’s a surprise.”

©2012 Community Newspaper Group