THE HOLDOUT (1958)
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The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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NEW YORK — The Michels family is too steeped in its materia medica and too deeply rooted in its neighborhood to give up its oM-tashioned pharmacy to make way for anything like a 75 nullion dollar office building.
Not even for $400,000.
The Michels family owns a narrow five-story brownstone building at 620 Lexington Ave.
A 42-story office building is going up on both sides and in back of the little brownstone.
Negotiators for Vincent Astor, who owns the controlling interest in the Astor Plaza project, have bean trying for five years to induce the family to vacate the pharmacy they own on the ground floor and sell the building for $400,000.
Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Michels and their son, Myron, are all registered pharmacists and long-time residents of the neighborhood. And they don’t want to move.
But their holdout is just a roadblock in the path to progress in the eyes of the financiers, engineers, architects and contractors erecting the office building.
The Michels brownstone is the only building remaining on the square block between Park and Lexington Avenues and 53rd and 54th streets.
“We want to stay right here,”
Mrs. Michels, a tiny, gray-haired woman, said yesterday. “We told the Astors we would sell the property if they make
room for us in the new building. But we’re not leaving the neighborhood.”
The little woman snapped: “They think because they’re the Astors they can wave a magic wand and every one does what
they want. But they can’t go around driving little people out of business.”
A spokesman for the company handling the financial arrangements for the office building construction said:
“Because of the requirements of lending institutions backing the Astor Plaza, we need tenants of high credit rating.”
But the Michels family, whose property is only 20 feet by 68 feet apparently doesn’t qualify.
A company spokesman said, “We’re proceeding to construct around it. Of course, the Lexington Avenue frontage would look better without the drugstore, but it looks to us as though the matter is finished”
Mrs. Michels – whose family is proud of its business even if it doesn’t have the same credit rating as the Astors – had this possibly final word:
“It’s just an old-fashioned pharmacy — no soda fountain and no Coca-Cola. . .
“We intend to continue to be an old-fashioned pharmacy as long as we can.”
(This story appeared in The Herkimer Evening Star newspaper on Wednesday, 11 September 1957. Featured photo by Angelo Rizzuto, courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
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