[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/ny...move.html?_r=0

Legendary Restaurant Is to Stay in Brooklyn
Owner of Junior’s Rethinks a Move





By VIVIAN YEE
SEPT. 8, 2014

Junior’s Restaurant has earned a lot of superlatives since it opened in Downtown Brooklyn on Election Day in 1950, among them the one that adorns every orange takeout box: “The Best Cheesecake in N.Y. — New York Magazine” (a distinction that dates to 1973, but still).

It was headed for another distinction this year, when Alan Rosen, who took over the business in 1992 and whose family has owned the restaurant since its first cheesecake, decided to sell the two-story building. In a neighborhood where real estate brokers talk about record-setting prices and rents the way pilots used to talk about breaking the sound barrier, the sale was major news. Offers to buy and build an apartment tower poured in from Brooklyn, Manhattan and abroad. The highest bid: $450 per buildable square foot, well over the previous high for Brooklyn of $350, for a total of $45 million in cash.

“That’s a lot of cheesecake,” said Mr. Rosen — who, nevertheless, and after much agonizing, a visit to his therapist and a series of sleepless nights, turned it down.

“This is Junior’s identity, is this building. This is the one where I came on my first dates. It’s where my family spent most of their waking hours,” he said in an interview on Monday, about a week after making his decision, as he contemplated his stewardship of a legend in Brooklyn. “Not the one down the street, not the one below 20 stories of condos. This one.”

When Mr. Rosen, 45, put the site up for sale in February, he said he would insist that the buyer bring Junior’s back to the ground floor of any new building. In the meantime, he said, the restaurant would open at another Brooklyn location and temporarily relocate the flagship within the neighborhood. (It also has outposts in Times Square, Grand Central Terminal and at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.) But he wavered over the summer, saying he would consider leaving the building permanently for the right offer.

The $45 million offer would not have accommodated a ground-floor Junior’s.

Mr. Rosen said he also received offers worth half that amount that would have allowed the restaurant to return, but after receiving disappointed calls from customers and talking it over with his longtime employees, his wife and his 81-year-old father, Walter Rosen, who still walks around the dining room some mornings, he decided he could not give it up.

Though Mr. Rosen insists the turnabout was a personal decision, not an attempt to preserve the old Downtown Brooklyn of which Junior’s is one of the few remnants, he is bucking a trend.

Once, Junior’s was the flashiest place around, bathing the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in neon-lit glory as presidents and princes flocked to its cheesecake cases. Now it is overshadowed, literally, by a nearby thicket of glassy spires that has risen over the past decade. Developers have built more than 30 apartment towers in the neighborhood, with nearly 30 more on the way.

In February, Robert Knakal, the broker on the not-quite-sale, declared the Junior’s location “the best site in Brooklyn.” On Monday, he was philosophical about watching his record-setting deal evaporate, even though, he said, “We always like to set pricing records.”

Mr. Knakal said he was consoling himself with the prospect of a couple of properties that would “probably” break the $500-per-square-foot barrier.

Mr. Rosen, for his part, was daydreaming about his customers’ telling him, “I’m so glad you guys are staying.”

“I’m not just running a restaurant,” he said. “I’m running something that has such a heritage and such a tradition for so many people here in Brooklyn, that it just can’t be replaced.”