I grew up in a small town. I have had multiple businesses in small towns, and for the most part I love small towns. Why? The sense of community; the feeling that people are there for each other and support each other’s businesses. I moved to Saugerties and opened the business in 2018 with the goal of setting down routes. I wanted to become part of a community and Saugerties seemed to be friendly, welcoming, and promising.

The store moved 3 times in the first 2 years it was open. The first location I opened was at 190 Main st., next door to the movie theater. I moved in on October 1st and began painting and putting fixtures up, all of which were built from scratch by me using old furniture and materials sourced from various places. I had to outfit the store without spending a dime. I opened the store as consignment and filled a 2000 sq. ft. space with all of my own merchandise. When you have close to 3 decades in the fashion industry and retail arbitrage, you accumulate a lot. Every item in the store represented hours of my time; rare pieces that I found while treasure hunting at various thrift stores, pieces I acquired over many years from trade shows, as well as different companies and small boutiques where I worked. When I rented the first space at 190 Main I paid for a year of rent up front, in cash. I had nothing saved, no credit cards, no loans, no debt – no cash flow. But I believed in myself and felt confident given my many years of experience. The only money I had was the cash that I used to pay for a full year’s rent up front – rent gives me an extraordinary amount of anxiety. It is the single most important thing to me and I have always paid it early or multiple months at a time if I have the ability.

I opened for business on Dec. 22nd, 2018. 5 weeks later I was constructively evicted.

Before deciding to rent the space, I inquired about the for sale sign out front. They said they had no plan of selling the building and took the sign down. 2 weeks after I moved in they sold the building. Per the lease it stated that they were supposed to offer me first right of refusal, they didn’t. The lease also stated that if any work was done on the property it would be done after hours and would not interrupt business. They worked on the apartment above me from 8 AM until I closed at 5 PM. It was so loud that customers who came in didn’t stay – and I don’t blame them. The building vibrated from the tools they were using. I walked in one day and there was a dirty towel hanging out of the ceiling above my cash wrap – which means people were in my store without my knowledge or consent. (This is a pattern in Saugerties.) There was sheetrock, dirt, and debris all over my desk and my computer, they were throwing sheetrock and garbage from the second floor into dumpsters and all over the parking lot, the power got cut one day without warning and I lost a project I was working on on my computer, I had just painted the entire space and the walls somehow got covered in water stains and the ceiling in the back room leaked and ruined all the clothes that were back there, the parking lot had a huge dumpster in it filled with construction materials and debris as well as the parking lot itself, a dump truck filled with garbage was backed up to porch, there were huge trucks filled with garbage parked along the side of the building, in the front of the building completely blocking the windows; I couldn’t even park in my parking lot let alone my customers. Half the lights didn’t work, and I had to repair the sink when I moved in.

The new owners not only did not give a shit about any of the above, but when I told them I couldn’t operate a business that way and wanted to leave, they had their attorney send me a wildly inappropriate, over the top, vile, I-cost-$800/hr-and-here’s-why 3 page letter. The letter said that all of my concerns are unfounded, that work upstairs will continue, and that I may choose to stay for one more year at the end of my lease, but that the rent would go from what it is now $1,000/mth of which I paid a full year upfront in cash, to $2,500/mth.

The letter basically stated that all of my concerns were unfounded bullshit and I was exaggerating everything to extort money from them. 

I asked for $10,000.

$6,000 of that $10,000 was the rent that I had paid in advance. It took until the end of March to figure everything out, and since I had paid rent up front they were certainly in no rush. The additional $4,000 was to cover the new floors in the bathroom I installed, the new front door I put in, the paint I used to paint the entire store including the ceilings, the time I put into doing all of it, the expenses I would incur moving, plus the months I could not be open and another month I would spend getting the next space ready to open. The new front door I installed – they would not let me take it with me. I was open for such a short period I don’t think I even broke $1000 in sales.

Just 4 months I had been open. 4 months – 2 and a half of which were spent outfitting the space on my own – and that was how fellow members of a small community treated me. People with deep pockets that moved up from the city who didn’t care about a small business owner working towards her dream, trying to make an honest living or what it took for me to open the store. They didn’t care that the store was my livelihood and that every penny I had went into opening it. To them it was just another investment property and I was just another thing that needed to be dealt with. I was essentially pushed out of my store by selfish assholes with deep pockets who made it impossible for me to conduct business, refused to have an adult conversation to come up with a reasonable solution about it, and almost TRIPLED THE RENT.

I got my 6 months of the year’s worth of rent that I had paid upfront back, and used itused to move to 110 Partition. A fabulous fucking dump.