Dublin Pub Auction Delayed Until July

The law offices of Richard Gertler were quiet Wednesday afternoon save for the namesake attorney an associate and a custodian among the suites and cubicles. There was no gavel, no bids, no auctioneer, no auction as had been advertised for the Dublin Pub  the New Hyde Park-based bar that was advertised to be sold below list value at 6 p.m. that day.

“We didn’t hold the auction, we postponed it to July 24,” Gertler said, sitting at the head of the table in the small conference room just off the main entrance to his offices, attributing the push-back to parties becoming interested in purchasing the property due to the recent media coverage. “We have a couple of private responses of people who’ve approached us; I would say probably less than half a dozen.”

The delay would allow new clients to tour the property and look over the prospectus of the property.

“You want to have as many people at the table to bid as possible because that fosters the higher price,” Gertner said. “I guess the response was not as strong as we initially thought and then last minute it became very strong. It creates the potential for more serious bidders.”

There has been much speculation over the future use of the structure and if a bar/ pub would remain at the location or even if it could remain viable again with the recent string of incidents. The location has used the Dublin Pub moniker since 1968.

“I have fond memories of having my shoes stick to the beer-sticky floor,” Gertler, a Long Beach native, said, recalling how he went bar hopping to OBI West and My Father’s Place in Roslyn “and maybe a few other places that had live music.”

The bar, located on Jericho Turnpike just beyond the border of the village in the unincorporated area, has been the subject of numerous incidents of alleged underaged drinking, resulting in fines and the suspension of its liquor license by the New York State Liquor Authority in April.

Gertler said that his clients Stan Majewski and Scott Blitzer tried a variety of measures to prevent underage drinking at the establishment, including hiring extra bouncers, use of an ID scanning machine and color-coded wrist bands indicating age, but patrons found ways of subverting the measures.

“The owners of this establishment went to great effort to screen the people that walked in,” he said. “They even scanned in some of the licenses if they thought it was suspect and kids still snuck in; you couldn’t stop it, it’s impossible to stop the kids from getting in. One or two occasions out of thousands and thousands of people who went there, they picked on one or two occasions.”

Gertler said he has been representing Majewski and Blitzer for about seven years, including a couple of cases in front of the state liquor authority where three individuals were underage drinkers.

“The police came in on a raid and they found these three kids and they confronted them and they said to the kids ‘show us your ID,’ they said to the kids ‘if you show us false ID it’s a felony and you’ll be arrested, if you tell us that the pub let you in without ID, we’ll let you go and we’ll prosecute the bar’ and that came up during the hearing and they blamed the bar,” Gertler said. “How do we now prove where these witnesses have gone? THe hearings are administrative hearings so they don’t have to produce evidence, they have to produce the statements by the police that said the kids wrote ‘we snuck in with no ID’. How do you prove that? Impossible.”

According to Gertner, once the Dublin Pub is sold, Majewski and Blitzer would be looking for another location to manage and operate in another area.

“Their desire’s really to have a smaller, more manageable location,” he said.

Real estate attorney Misha Haghani stated that Majewski and Blitzer currently have over $1 million invested in the business and obtained a loan in October 2011 and that the property was appraised at the time at $1.4 million, though he believes it is currently worth $1.5 million. The business has reportedly suffered due to the recession. The starting price for the auction was originally set at $899,000. A mortgage is currently outstanding on the property, but is less than the starting price of the auction.

“We don’t know exactly and they’re very tight-lipped,” Gertler said when asked for what purpose the prospective clients would be interested in using the property, admitting that the prospective buyers have been asking numerous questions. “I would think that some of them would want to use it as some sort of a bar, perhaps a bar/restaurant, perhaps a steakhouse, maybe an upscale-type place. If they have a use for it and they have a desire, perhaps the number goes up a little bit.”

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