School Said to Score a Win in Battle Against Cigar Smell

Millennium High PTA president Tara Silberberg in the “mulitpurpose” room, next door to a smoking lounge, that will be renovated with $400,000 from the state. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Parents, staff and students will no longer be raising a stink over the smell of cigar smoke at Millennium High School.

The school and tobacconist Barclay Rex have been uneasy next-door neighbors at 75 Broad Street since Millennium opened there in 2004. The store’s smoking room—one of the few commercial spaces in the city where smoking is still allowed—shares a party wall and part of a ventilation system. Efforts to contain the odor, according to the school, have proved futile. The tobacco store owner says otherwise.

Last month, the building’s landlord said he will not renew the tobacconist’s lease.

The decision, by owner Joseph Jerome of JEMB Realty, is meant to clear the air in a ground-floor “multipurpose” room used for physical education classes in the school, which lacks a gym. (The school proper is housed on three converted
upper floors of the office building.)

It also means that $400,000 of state money, allocated last year by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to turn the room into a more gym-like facility, can soon be spent.

“Very smartly, they weren’t going to put the money into the space to make it into a gym if it still smelled like a Vegas casino,” said PTA president Tara Silberberg, who worked with Paul Goldstein, Silver’s district office director, to resolve the issue.

Citing a “very close relationship” with Silver's office, Jerome called the decision “the easiest way to go.”

“I think we’re doing an accommodation for a very good tenant and we want to make sure that everything we do with them is appropriate and they’re happy with their home here at 75 [Broad],” Jerome said. He would not change his mind about renewing the lease even if Barclay-Rex owner Vince Nastri chose
to close the smoking room, he said.

Silberberg said the parents are now hoping the school will be able to expand the multipurpose room into the vacated storefront.

But in a telephone interview with the Trib on June 28, Nastri said he was unaware of his landlord’s decision.

“That’s news to me,” said the owner, who opened his Broad Street store 13 years ago, a business that his grandfather started on Barclay Street in 1910. “I’ve been talking to the landlord and he hadn’t given me any indication that it’s not going to be renewed.”

Nastri said his lease expiration was “a few years away” but would not say when. Jerome said it would be “soon” but also would not be more specific.

At the urging of the school’s PTA, the store recently upgraded its ventilation system, but still failed to eliminate the odor, according to Silberberg and others at the school.

“It was kind of sad because we got them to spend 40 grand—I saw all the paperwork on the equipment that they purchased,” Silberberg said. “It probably is not their fault. Something is wrong with the way the ventilation system was set up for that room and nobody can figure out what it is.”

But Nastri said the problem, which he claims was exacerbated by faulty ventilation in the school, is solved.

“We changed the whole ventilation system completely. It’s been corrected,” he said, noting that technicians who installed the equipment as well as the building’s managing agent have verified that there is no more odor.

(With the school now closed, independent verification for this article was not possible.)

Silberberg said that, as recently as early June, the odor was apparent during an orientation for incoming freshmen.

“I had multiple parents come up to me,” she recalled, “and they asked, ‘Does it al ways smell like this in here?’”