Gerth: Downtown businesses' parking lot fight called 'shakedown'

There’s a huge pile of trash growing in a parking lot behind a couple of restaurants on Fourth Street near the Louisville Palace.

Garbage trucks have emptied the four dumpsters there just once since Oct. 26 when businessman George Stinson erected a temporary fence around the lot and told other businesses they can’t use it anymore.

On Wednesday, when the temperature gets up to 78 degrees, the garbage should be smelling pretty rank.

All because Stinson – who may or may not own rights to the property – has decided that if the Palace wants to keep using the land he bought from the city of Louisville for $15,000 three years ago, it must buy it from him for $740,000.

That is a classic “shakedown,” according to a cease and desist letter Allan Cobb, a lawyer for the Palace and several other businesses, wrote to Stinson’s lawyer last week demanding the fence be removed.

Jeff Kopple, who owns Sicilian Pizza and Pasta and is vice president of the Theater Building’s condominium board, says it even more harshly.

“You buy that lot for $15,000 from the city and you go to a big company like Live Nation (which operates the Palace) and tell them you’ll sell it to them for $750,000, you’re straight just trying to extort money,” he said. “It’s ridiculous … It’s abuse of the city and it’s abuse of all the businesses.”

Meanwhile, the pile of garbage continues to grow – mainly with garbage from Sicilian Pizza & Pasta, Safier Mediterranean Deli and Havana Nights and the Palace, which can fill up five dumpsters in one night if it has a packed show, Kopple said.

Day after day. Smell after smell.

It’s not their fault.

They really don’t have anywhere else to put their dumpsters. The alley behind the restaurants is too narrow to house them. Heck, it’s too narrow to park a Mini Cooper without impeding a firetruck.

This all started in April of 2020 when Stinson − who owns the old Kentucky Theater where he ran The Marketplace restaurant for over a decade before it closed during COVID – decided he wanted to buy the property.

For years he had leased it and other property behind the restaurant for $1 per year. He said the arrangement began when former Mayor Jerry Abramson asked him to pretty up the then-city-owned area.

Stinson said he spent nearly $1 million building a patio for The Marketplace on one tract and had plans to do more before his restaurant closed for good. If he was going to sink more money into it, Stinson said he thought he should own it.

The city, in 2020, agreed.

Jeff O’Brien, the head of the city’s economic development arm, told a Metro Council committee in April of 2020 that selling the land would benefit the city because it would return the property to tax rolls. The price – $15,000 – was low because part of the property had “significant easements that encumber it” providing access to the back of the Palace.

I suppose the lot that Stinson is trying to sell for fifty times what he bought if for is the property with the “significant easements” that O'Brien was talking about.

Stinson’s biggest problem appears to be with the Palace, which has traditionally used the lot for unloading sets and amps and other equipment for shows.

Stinson said the theater has also parked tour buses on the property, blocked the lot and created a hazard because the buses block fire lanes. He also said he was named in a claim when a worker was injured in the lot unloading equipment for a show at the Palace.

“I think there was a mention of me in a lawsuit,” he said. (I couldn’t find any such suit in Jefferson Circuit Court naming either Stinson or SLS Management, the company he owns.)

“I kept asking these people for liability insurance,” he said. “They were constant problems.”

Furthermore, he said some of the restaurants, especially Sicilian Pizza, have failed to keep the area around the dumpsters clean, leading to problems with rats and other critters.

“The health department kept calling me,” he said.

Kopple acknowledged that it’s sometimes hard to keep trash off the ground because homeless people often climb in the dumpsters in search of food but that restaurants do the best they can to keep the area clean.

And he said the Louisville Metro Health Department has never dinged him in an inspection for problems with the dumpsters.

Besides putting dumpsters there, Kopple said restaurants have used the lot for deliveries too − both the supplies that are delivered to the restaurants and as a place for drivers who deliver prepared meals to downtown businesses to park.

It’s clear that Stinson owns the lot – the deed clearly says that. What is unclear is what that really means.

The problem is that in 1985, the city placed a deed of dedication on the property, saying it would be preserved “without cost for public use.” It doesn’t appear that deed of dedication has ever been removed.

An old acquaintance who practices real estate law told me it it’s difficult to remove such provisions once they are included in deeds unless it’s found that the provisions violate the law or that the area has changed so dramatically, the provisions are just silly.

He used the example of a small rural tract with a deed restriction saying it can never be used for commercial purposes but years later, as neighbors sell their farms, the property comes to lie in the middle of a commercial or industrial area.

A judge might strike down the deed restriction in that case, he said.

But that clearly hasn’t happened here.

And the plat in the Jefferson County Property Valuation Administrator’s office clearly says the lot is a “parking, loading and unloading easement.”

Kopple said he doesn’t know what he and the other businesses will do – or if they will be able to survive – if Stinson continues to keep the lot and their dumpsters fenced off.

“We haven’t gotten that far but it is going to be a major, major hindrance,” Kopple said. “One scenario would be, the city would have to give us those big garbage bins and we’d have to roll them around and put them on Fourth Street each night. But we have way, way more garbage than we can put in one of those.”

In the meantime, the dumpsters will continue to stink because Stinson put up the fence.

They’re not the only thing that stinks.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville Palace, restaurant owners cut off from alley in legal fight