“Tom ate trouble for desert.” That was Sarah Martin—former head of the Grant Houses’ tenant association—lauding her late comrade Tom DeMott at his Memorial, which was held at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem on December 1rst.
Sarah’s line hinted at Tom’s appetite for life which made him an organizer for the Ages and an artist on the come in the last decade of his life. His memorializers tried to take in his variousness.
Tom’s paintings looked happy in a side-room with windows and flowers and Sancerre. (Though carrot sticks, M&Ms and numberless cider donuts made the surround seem homey and Homer Pricey—not like some simulacrum of a pricey gallery). Tom’s music got across. Strong as death, sweet as love, a recording of his voice and piano were up to his End. His song, “It’s Hard,” finished us (after all the talk).
The Memorial was big and messy, but there were grace notes throughout. Like when his granddaughter Shai put her lips together to show that Tom had taught her to whistle. There were plenty of generous gestures in Tom’s tradition as a host above most. My friend Phil who’d begun musicking with Tom over the past year or so, came to the Memorial bearing a cup of expresso, figuring (rightly) I’d need caffeine. Another friend of Tom’s who’d known him for more than 50 years, caned in from Jersey, despite being in obvious pain. Matt recalled how he’d first hung with Tom at a Genet play in the late 60s. An anecdote that spoke to me about Tom’s rangey ways since Matt’s youngest brother had told me his first serious brush with Tom came when he watched him play basketball in the “Small Schools Tourney,” which made Peter think at the time “…Some day…” (A day which came to pass.)
Charlie O’Brien recalled other inspirations—holy goofs he pulled off with Tom way back in the day. There was the night in the 70s when O’Brien came back from seeing The Duelists, a film based on Kleist’s story about two Hussars—played by Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel–who fight a series of duels with each other. A half hour after OB had communed with Tom about the movie, the West End Bar was filled with fiery Lieutenants calling out drinkers and dominoes players, friends (and befuddled) strangers: “You have insulted me and I demand satisfaction!”
Thanks to Tom, the Coalition to Preserve Community dared to goof on Columbia’s power-brokers. Sarah Martin recalled how Tom convinced the CPC to print counterfeit money featuring the mug of C.U.’s president. The CPC showered ex-Mayor David Dinkins with these “Bollinger Dollars” when Dinkins defended Columbia’s Harlem land grab at a public hearing (right after he’d been appointed to the University’s faculty).
I’m reminded just now there was one bore at the Memorial who deserved a rebuke. Though I suppose this speaker gave us all a taste of what Tom had to put up with to get stuff done. Soulful reps from The Movement for Justice in El Barrio (“Tom DeMott Vive en Nuestros Corazones”) offered a better testament to Tom’s patience, recalling how he once waited all day (locked out and stretched out on a hard floor) for a chance to speak on their behalf. (What they may not have realized is that Tom made sure he wasn’t at the mercy of dead time. If one job was delayed, he always came prepped to work on something else as he waited.) The folks from El Barrio came over to St. Mary’s from East Harlem and their voices amped up the testimony of another Latin brother from West Harlem. Luis Tejada of The Mirabal Center gave the Memorial’s most galvanizing speech. He called on people to press pols to rename Tom’s block, “DeMott Place.” Luis doesn’t B.S. With help from other public figures who eulogized Tom at the Memorial–newly elected State Assemblyman Harvey Epstein and Norman Siegel–Luis might find enough allies to make that happen.
You’ll see why it should if you read Lynn and Jeff Kraus’s stories of Tiemann Place’s Tenants Alliance. They spoke early on at the Memorial–after a Haitian-American drummer’s invocation & the Minister’s welcome. Lynn broke the Alliance’s struggle down to its (bolded) essence. Then Jeff nailed details that brought it all home for those at St. Mary’s who missed this sequence in the people’s history of NYC.
ALLIANCE MEMORIES
Hi, I am Lynn Kraus
I worked with Tom DeMott for 26 years on Tenants Alliance rent cases.
Our building went on rent strike in 1984 to force the landlord to make the repairs we needed.
In 1986, represented by the Community Law Office, we entered into an agreement with the landlord that settled the rent strike and guaranteed repairs.
This stip was binding on successors in case the buildings changed hands — which happened almost immediately.
Our subsequent landlords were speculators, scoundrels and federal receivers. What they had in common is that they would do anything but fix the buildings.
Instead, they challenged 1986 agreement over and over in city, state and federal courts.
Ultimately the stip survived and our landlords made the repairs after two decades of litigation.
We stayed in our homes.
Throughout, we were represented by great lawyers from the Community Law office — Andrew Lehrer, David Weinraub and Harvey Epstein.
However none of this would have worked without Tom DeMott.
I cannot stress this enough.
He was relentless, pragmatic, inventive and always courageous. Nothing was too large or too small for him to tackle.
He made folks who had no faith in the system think they could win this fight.
We were successful because of Tom.
We are here because of Tom.
Now we are here for each other and for Tom’s family.
Thank you.
***
Lynn’s husband Jeff Kraus picked up the story…
Greetings to my long-time friends and neighbors, and to the many others who are here for Tom DeMott. And my most heartfelt acknowledgments and sympathy to the DeMott family.
I am here to talk about the Tenants Alliance, but I promise to be brief! By the “Tenants Alliance,” I refer to the “55 and 69 Tiemann Place 550 Riverside Drive Tenants Alliance” (very hard to fit onto a deposit slip!) formed by Tom and a couple of others 38 years ago, which fostered one of the longest-running tenant legal battles in New York City’s history.
I moved into my current apartment in 1980. When my wife Lynn moved in with me a year later, she was appalled by the conditions. I had an umbrella in the bathroom for water leaks and we could see down three floors through the gaps. I said, hey, you’re used to finer things — you came from 110th Street! She suggested (rather strongly) that I meet with the people who put up signs for a new tenants’ group starting up in the next building. They mentioned rent strikes and I thought, oh, gee, that could be trouble.
I went to the organizers’ apartment, expecting 60s firebrands from back in the day. Maria served me tea and Tom cogently explained how rent strikes were safe, legal and effective, as long as you have enough members. We joined the Alliance that day, and a week later I led a meeting in our building to convince fellow tenants to join for the good of us all.
The rest is history.
Soon there were many Alliance members in the three buildings and we went on strike. Back then you didn’t need to establish an escrow account, but we got every member to put their monthly rent into an Alliance account in case a court ruling went against us. The account grew, and our masterful attorneys at the Community Law Office helped us manage it. Thank you, The Honorable Andrew Lehrer and his amazing associates! Thanks to our legal help we got Housing inspectors into our buildings who recorded over 1,500 violations, which we then moved to get repaired.
Let me just say, going to Housing Court with dozens of fellow tenants was a bonding experience for us all. We filled the courtrooms and jury boxes. More than one judge gazed at us and knew that the only thing we had in common was our landlord — our claims MUST be true! We organized dozens of trips downtown to 111 Centre Street, and later to 60 Centre as we moved up the judicial system Almost every time we eventually emerged victorious, with everyone returning to our block in triumph, telling family and friends, “We won! AND we had pizza!”
Despite our legal successes, no real repairs were made and back we went for another round.
We used to go to the Calendar Session in Housing Court to get assigned a judge who had time for our case. After a while we worked out a system — when we were told by the clerk to visit a particular judge, we set up a caravan with Tom in the lead, stretching taller even than he was, with the rest of us flanking him and hiding the pro-bono attorney hunched behind holding the 3-foot stack of case documents to hide it from the judge who otherwise would go, “Oh, no, I don’t have time for THAT!” When we had to produce the huge stack of paper, we would say, It’s three buildings! Most of this stuff is duplicates!” It sometimes took a while, but we always got a judge.
Two of our three buildings became coops on a single morning in 1987, and declared bankruptcy the same afternoon. The third, Tom and Maria’s, didn’t manage to perform that seedy trick and went a different way. Someone else can give you those details, although we are obviously the same related, committed and bonded tribe in all three buildings.
During this time Tom came up with the ingenious idea of attempting to get our landlord’s real estate license revoked for his flagrant abuses of the law. We were represented by a state attorney and spent many days giving courtroom testimony. I testified about the types and duration of outstanding violations (a spreadsheet that Lynn and I produced over the course of that summer on Rockaway beach). At the conclusion of my session, the landlord’s lawyer muttered “Castro!” The state attorney said, “What?! What?!” “The lawyer replied, “Nothing! Nothing!” Fellow tenants asked me “Why did he think you were Luis Castro?” (a fellow tenant). I said, “No, he was referring to Fidel.” “Fidel? Why HIM?” I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s an Anglo thing.”
In the end the guy kept his license and is a major owner to this day, but we slowed him down, put a permanent blot on his record and taught him to treat us with some respect. It cost us nothing and was another notch in our collective belt, all thanks to Tom.
In late 1986 all our court cases to date were settled together. We were awarded 50% of our five years’ rent, totaling $270,000. We had our first Alliance Christmas party and gave out checks to 70 apartments based on what they had paid in, and trusted us for, over all that time.
Tom at the first Alliance Xmas Party, holding a painting by Eric Giraud
People cried and said, now my child can go to college. That was quite a party! Many pictures on the wall are from that amazing day.
I routinely got coop information via FOIA requests from the State AG’s office at 120 Broadway. One day in 1989 I was asked by a paralegal who my landlord was. He was the holder of unsold shares of our coop, namely, the 85% of the apartments they couldn’t sell. When I mentioned his name, her eyes widened and she said, “WAIT! Talk to the lawyer!” It turned out that they had a massive case pending against the guy and our information tipped the balance for a 40-count felony indictment. The guy was 29 at the time of his conviction and jailing. He now sells re-used mattresses online. Our former landlord! We still have no security deposits since he stole them from us as well as the capital reserve fund from our so-called coop and many others. Nobody has asked us for security deposits since then.
At that point we were assigned a federal receiver who wouldn’t spend a dime on the buildings, so we used our current rent strike money to pay for oil deliveries to get through three winters, for the entire buildings, Alliance or not. Also, the receiver sued, claiming that his federal status overruled city laws to fix our apartments. Our lead attorney Andrew Lehrer successfully won that case as a national precedent in front of Judge Kimba Wood in the Southern District.
We eventually got our current landlord, a family-run Queens real estate would-be dynasty. (Uh, does that sound familiar?) They started out playing hardball, with their “manager” tearing down Alliance door signs and getting into vicious arguments with our members. Tom called Legal Aid. Zaharis and I went to meet a new CLO lawyer named Harvey Epstein at the Tiemann Oasis restaurant on our block, run by Saad, who is here today. Much to our surprise, a young, energetic dude with an earring rolled up on a bike from the Lower East Side with a briefcase covered with political decals. This was Harvey Epstein! We walked over to the local police precinct where Harvey laid out our complaints to the captain and demanded protection for his clients. The captain promptly called our landlord and informed him that he was on notice for any trouble he might cause in his precinct. We thanked him and left. The landlord’s “manager” was never seen on our block again. This was the auspicious start of Harvey’s continued work for the Alliance over the next chapter of our saga.
Oh, and by the way, Harvey Epstein is now a New York State Assemblyman after voting in the first rent freeze in the city on the Rent Control Board! He’s been busy!
After that rocky start, our landlord tried another trick. This was now 1999. They owned all the non-sold apartments in our two buildings, and they formed a corporation to hold the stock of only Alliance apartments. Since all of us were still paying half rent due to court orders, which didn’t cover the landlord’s maintenance fees owed to the coop, they filed for bankruptcy of this newly-formed corporation and charged that we, their tenants, were creditors! The case was filed in Federal Eastern District Bankruptcy Court in Brooklyn and we all got summonses the day before Christmas.
We arrived at court en masse with our CLO attorney. The case was before Chief Justice Conrad Duberstein, who deserves a much more detailed description than I have time for here. The 87-year old judge looked at the case, turned to his clerk, and said in open court, “Why do I get this far-cocked a case?” He read out the names of the tenants, (of course from dozens of cultures and nations) and said, “These don’t sound like creditors to me!” Judge Duberstein mused archly, “Gee, we have tenants who want repairs, and a landlord who wants rent. Surely there is some mechanism in this city to deal with this issue?” I thought of the tall building at 111 Centre Street dedicated to that eternal conflict where we had spent so many tense days over the years. The judge eventually assigned the case to a Special Master, and a mere 9 months of deliberation later, we had a settlement that linked completed repairs with incremental rent increases, allowing for clawbacks and penalties. Over the course of three years all repairs were done under the watchful eye of a court-ordered engineer. All violations were cured, something we had been demanding for a quarter of a century
By the way, that landmarked courthouse was named for Judge Duberstein, who passed away in 2005 at the age of 90.
In recent years the current landlord has taken to complaining to us (that is, Tom) about the coop boards, who prevented him from replacing lights and windows due to the cost. Tom’s steady hand and winning ways had eventually won over our landlord who had threatened and sued us in the past! It has been one very long and very strange trip.
Tom helped create other organizations like the WHC and CPC, which others will speak of. But when Tom passed, he was at his computer finalizing the tenants’ response to an MCI rent increase request. When word spread, shocked Alliance members gathered and worked into the night, finishing the response, tracking down dozens of signatures, and delivering it to the post office in the early morning just before the deadline. Tom is no longer here but his Alliance survives, thanks to his constant focus and passion.
Sometimes I’ve thought of Tom as Moses leading his people across the Red Sea, but sometimes as Kurt Russell in Used Cars. The Alliance story should still be a major motion picture, but it’s hard to blend Battle of Algiers with MASH.
I can’t remember a single minute, talking to Tom, when he wasn’t upbeat or at least resolute in the face of trouble. The man was a force for good, a force for justice, finally a force for art. He was a force. He is dearly missed and always will be.
Twenty-nine years ago Tom stood up for Bruce Bailey with the words, “Don’t mourn — organize!”
Tom was a month older than me. Today I am exactly four days older than he ever got to be. Peace to you, my brother.