A recent suit alleged that Guastavino's has illegally claimed the public city plaza as its own for the past decade -- repeatedly excluding citizens from the space -- while charging venue customers up to $300,000 a pop to rent it for private events.
Page F3From§Eachthe early evening edition — 7 September 2026
Council lets venue charge $300,000 for public plaza a decade, now threatens to maybe sue
As it ran on the front
The plaza under the Queensboro Bridge is public. That is not spin; it is the label the city itself uses when it explains what Guastavino's sits inside of. All together now — the word is "public." Say it once, because after this paragraph it stops meaning anything.
A lawsuit filed this year says the venue has spent the last decade acting as if the plaza belongs to it alone, not to the city, not to the people who are told they own it. The filing alleges routine exclusion of ordinary citizens from a space that, on paper, they can walk into any day of the week. In practice, per the suit, the gate stays closed unless you are one of the people paying for the privilege.…
…(cont) That price, according to the same filing: up to $300,000 for a single private event. A decade of $300,000 nights is not a rounding error under a bridge; it is a business model, run out of a plaza the sign calls public and the books treat as private inventory. Ten years is long enough to open a restaurant, close it, and open another — long enough, certainly, for somebody at City Hall to have noticed that the word "public" was carrying none of the weight it was supposed to.
Somebody has now noticed. The New York City Council, per this week's reporting, is threatening to join the lawsuit against the venue. Not filing. Not suing. Threatening to consider joining a suit that a decade of $300,000 nights already made necessary for someone else to bring. The Council that could have asked, at any point in ten years, whether "public" still applied, arrives at the question roughly a decade late, with a hedge built into the verb — "threatens," a word that means the city has not yet decided the plaza it owns is worth defending.
All together now, one more time, because the lawsuit says it and the Council has not yet managed to: the plaza is public. What the last ten years demonstrate is that "public" is a label the city prints and does not enforce, a status you keep only until someone charges $300,000 to make everyone forget it. The Council's part now is easy. It has exactly one word to defend, and it's already printed on the sign.
“"Public" is doing the same work "temporary" does on a tax cut for the rich — it's the word they print so you stop asking who actually gets to walk in. Ten years of $300,000 parties under a bridge you paid to maintain, and the city's big move this week is a press release saying it's thinking about maybe getting mad. That plaza was never closed to the public because it was full — it was closed because "public" doesn't pay $300,000 a night and somebody figured that out a decade ago.”
“Look, "public plaza" is a zoning designation, not a — okay, it is literally the word on the deed, fine, but the venue provides activation and programming the city could never fund itself, that's a public-private partnership, that's smart governance. The Council joining the suit now shows the system works, the checks are — did I just call a decade-late maybe-lawsuit a check? That's not — let me get back to you on that one.”
The receipts
· Luxe NYC venue hijacks public plaza under iconic bridge to rake in up to $300K a pop using shocking enforcers: suit from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.