A former board president of the famous Dakota is suing the co-op board, claiming that they have entrenched racist and discriminatory practices. Former board president Alphonse Fletcher Jr. says in his suit that he was smeared by board members who were trying to block him from buying a second apartment in the building, which has been home to such luminaries as John Lennon, Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, Rosie O'Donnell, and Rosemary's demon baby. "Although such conduct by a co-op board on the Upper West Side of Manhattan may seem surprising, this behavior was consistent with the defendants' extensive pattern of hostility toward non-white residents of the building," he claims in the lawsuit.
Fletcher Jr., an African-American, went so far as to accuse the board of discriminating against two people in particular, a black woman and a Hispanic man; a source identified the two people to the Post as Roberta Flack and Antonio Banderas. Back in 2005, former resident Albert Maysles tried to sell his Dakota apartment to Banderas and Melanie Griffith, but the board didn't allow it; "We had someone, but then the board, for reasons that they don't tell you, they turned it down," Maysles told the Times at the time (although two other celebrities, Gene Simmons and Billy Joel, were also rejected in the early '00s). According to the suit, board members "made jokes regarding the Hispanic husband's desire to have a first floor apartment so that he could purchase drugs from people on the street."
Fletcher Jr. is seeking the court approval for his purchase of a second apartment, as well as unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for the board members' "unlawful discriminatory practice." It's hard to believe such discrimination could have taken place in the same building where Yoko Ono once wrote the universal peace anthem, "Give Me Something."
