OCTOBER 24, 2023 – Before we could get to the starting line, our lawyer informed us we’d need to hurry up and wait for “the judge to sign a stipulated order.” The matter related to a relatively obscure law peculiar to New Jersey, whereby a state-appointed commission and every municipality had to agree on a ratio of affordable housing to market-priced housing for multi-family developments. I’d been informed that the agreed-upon ratio for Rutherford was favorable for our development, but a stipulated order to that effect had yet to be signed by the court with jurisdiction.
Good. Fine . . . Great, actually, except whenever I checked with Charles Sarlo, our lawyer, week in, week out, month in, month out, the answer was always the same: “I’m told we can expect the order to be signed any day now.”
Meanwhile, Cliff circulated among borough officials in his usual fashion, and with select individuals among them he shared our preliminary concept drawings. He received only enthusiastically positive reactions.
To bolster current operating income of the properties in order to fund ongoing professional fees and clean-up costs, Cliff and I embarked on an aggressive plan to rent out 42 Lincoln and lease up additional retail space along Park Avenue and Highland Cross. We had little trouble attracting and signing up qualified tenants.
We then rented large scale dumpsters—one by one. During down times Cliff directed some of his crew to fill the dumpsters with 125 years’ worth of warehouse trash. At $500 per dumpster and my estimate of cubic warehouse space packed with crap times labor at $20 an hour, I’d budgeted $100,000 for clean-up (not counting the clean-out of 42 Lincoln).
Progress . . . of a sort. Then along with the rest of civilization, we ran into the buzz saw of Covid-19. By March 11, 2020—my last day of going to work at a downtown Minneapolis office building—my legal work was wholly devoted to managing a single crisis: unwinding contracts for A Prairie Home Companion Caribbean cruise, which had been scheduled to embark from Ft. Lauderdale just one week later.
The voyage had promised to be Garrison’s comeback event. After being unfairly snagged in a not-so-funny comedy of grievances unrelated to #MeToo, he’d fallen victim to the movement. In late 2017, publishers, press and booking agents, and pubic radio stations dropped him and his work like chocolate confections mistaken in the dark for dog turds. (The people ranted viciously against him hadn’t been fans of his work in the first place.) Ever since Garrison and his inner circle had been working feverishly to rehabilitate his dashed career.
The APHC cruises, dating back to 2005 and for a dozen years financed by Minnesota Public Radio (until ticket revenues were fully collected), had been a tremendous success. I was among the crew who advocated for his self-financing of the 2020 comeback cruise. Our bet had initially proved to be a good one: the 2020 venture sold out in just 22 hours. With this success, I argued, we’d have convincing evidence for agents, publishers, and broadcasters that among his fan base, Garrison had lost little to no traction because of #MeToo.
But in a quintessential display of Robert Burns’ famous line, “The best laid plans of mice and men . . .” the Epidemic swamped the cruise before APHC cruiser-fans could find their way to Ft. Lauderdale. For the rest of March and through most of April 2020, the capsized project in Rutherford was displaced by a more immediate crisis: recovering the million-dollar-plus deposit from a cruise line in acute financial peril.
Back at Fun Ghoul the Epidemic lockdown had pushed business right off the cliff. The master of big party productions was left hanging on by his fingernails.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
