Most everyone's heard that Katz's Delicatessen is expanding to Brooklyn. But what about it's iconic counterpart?
A month after a gas leak annihilated an East Village building and left two dead last May, an illegal gas hookup was also discovered at the famed Carnegie Deli.
It was immediately closed indefinitely pending repairs and inspections. Now, six months later, the ubiquitous deli still isn't reopened. So what's going on?
It doesn't help the situation that Carnegie owners, Marian Harper and Sanford Levine, were entrenched in an awfully public divorce at the time of the illegal hookup's discovery
In fact, the gas incident came to light around the same time as Sanford "Sandy" Levine's "illegal hookup" with one of his service staff at the deli, who Harper had even accused of recipe stealing.
Now, Harper, still the President of the Carnegie Deli, still has no idea when or if the deli will reopen, stating, "Unfortunately we do not have a clear date of reopening at this time and had expected to reopen this month."
The City's Buildings Dept. noted that it can't approve a reopening until the building passes a "gas authorization" test, while Con Edison is apparently waiting on the City to approve their own gas testing.
So it's a perpetual non-motion machine, but there are dozens of people's lives wrapped up in the equation. Not only are all of Carnegie's near 70 employees out of work for now, but all of the upstairs tenants are without hot water and heat.
By now, unemployment insurance for all the employees has run out, but it's not time to go back to work yet, and nobody quite knows why.
The union representing the Carnegie employees, Unite Here Local 100, blames the company for the issues, while one waitress stated, "If you have a restaurant that makes the money that that restaurant makes, you should have people working there 24 hours a day fixing it, but they don't."
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[via New York Post]
[Feature Image Courtesy Instagram]