The Bloomberg administration rejected a significantly higher bid for the license to operate Tavern on the Green, instead awarding the rights to an operator who failed to deliver, according to financial documents obtained by the Post through the Freedom of Information Law. Dean Poll, who operates the Central Park Boathouse cafe, won the rights with a $57.3 million bid and the promise to invest $25 million in renovations. But the restaurant's longtime operator—Jennifer LeRoy and the LeRoy family—agreed to pay the city $86 million in fees over the 20-year lease. It was by far the highest bid, but the Parks Department rejected it, and now the famous restaurant is going to be a visitors center and hot-dog stand for the foreseeable future.
"It just doesn't add up or make sense," LeRoy, 31, tells the tabloid. "If I had done something wrong, I would understand losing Tavern. But I thought we had a good relationship with the city. We loved it like it was our own and put millions into it that we could have had to do another project. We expected a fair chance to stay—and now it seems like it wasn't even there." A Parks Department spokesperson insists, "The fee was not the only factor considered." But in its RFP, the city said the fee would carry the most weight in the vetting process. The city will put out a new RFP in the fall, and LeRoy—who tearfully auctioned off most of Tavern's glitzy furnishings after losing the lease—said she'll submit another proposal.
Post columnist Steve Cuozzo has been consistently ranting about how the Tavern deal was mismanaged by the city, and he speculates that City Hall was determined to oust Jennifer LeRoy "because it held a grudge against her family dating back decades. And Mayor Bloomberg is indebted to union Local 6, which favors his land-use plans. Poll's Boathouse Cafe is nonunion. He wanted to eliminate insane pay scales at Tavern and union work rules at Tavern that scared off most other wannabe operators. But Local 6 saw a chance to muscle Poll into unionizing the Boathouse in exchange for concessions at Tavern." In the end, they both lost out, and now there's one less place to pay too much for mediocre food in Central Park.
