Less than a week after Chelsea’s closed after 28 years in business beneath the Perkins Road overpass, work crews have begun long overdue repairs to the building’s leaky roof—a situation Chelsea’s owner Dave Remmetter describes as a humiliation.
“I come in to Chelsea’s on January 5 to clear out our stuff and I hear a lease has been signed and there are roofers out there,” he says. “To me that is very disappointing because I had asked for months that they fix the roof. It’s humiliating.”
Property manager Dave Trusty says the building’s owners have not signed a lease with a new tenant, but that talks are under way with several potential occupants.
“I’ve got five letters of intent with people all wanting to do something,” Trusty says. “We’re meeting this week to decide which group the owners want to go with. We’ve got some great people wanting to do great things with that building that everybody is going to love.”
Remmetter announced in early December he would close his popular restaurant and music venue at the end of the year, citing frustration over the building’s condition and the owners’ failure to fix the leaky roof.
Remmetter says he had been complaining about the roof for more than a year and refused to sign a new lease at a higher rate with the owners until they repaired it. He was on a month-to-month lease and says he was engaged in negotiations with the owners through Trusty, but wasn’t making any progress.
“I wasn’t going to sign a lease until the roof was fixed,” he says.
Trusty, however, says Remmetter was told repeatedly throughout the past year that repairs to the aging roof were coming. But the process was timely and costly because of the roof’s complicated, curved design. Seven roofing companies turned down the repair job before a New Orleans contractor agreed to do it for $82,000, he says.
“Remmetter knew we had a contract with Guaranty Roofing in New Orleans,” Trusty says. “They were supposed to start work over Thanksgiving but got delayed because of the weather … then the engineers were supposed to go in and do some work. It was all very technical. … By then, he had already made up his mind to leave.”
Remmetter, who is developing a beer garden in Mid City and also owns the Radio Bar and Bin Q Liquor, believes the timing of events is more than coincidental.
“The whole situation is very disingenuous,” he says. “I knew this would happen and it’s happening.”
But Trusty says there was no conspiracy to nudge Chelsea’s out of its location and, in fact, says the building’s owners would happily entertain a proposal from Remmetter should he decide to reopen there.
“I sat with him and talked with him and said, ‘We are in the process of doing the roof’ before he ever announced he was closing, so for him to act surprised is really kind of funny,” Trusty says. “But if he came to us today and said he wanted to reopen we’d welcome a letter of intent and evaluate it against the other offers.”
—Stephanie Riegel
