Town Center Plaza on S. Fourth Ave. looks just as it has for years: Eastern Accents, Bandito’s, and Salon Vertigo are going about their respective businesses, and even Fred, landlord Dale Newman’s parrot, is still living in the basement. (Newman himself also spends many nights in the building, but won’t admit to actually living there.)
For Newman, no news is good news. When the Observer wrote about his troubles this past April, he needed more than a half-million dollars to bail himself out of a defaulted mortgage, the roof was leaking, and he himself was possibly headed for jail, since he owed the city $30,000 in parking tickets.
How did Newman reclaim the building from foreclosure? “I got a $1.3 million mortgage, and right now I’m getting bids for a green roof,” he says. “This particular type of green roof is the Cadillac–or the Mercedes, depending on how you feel about cars–of green roofs.”
And what about those parking tickets, accumulated on many vehicles, under many business names, over many years? “Oh,” Newman says breezily, “the city dropped all the charges.”
“He still owes us the parking ticket money,” responds assistant city attorney Robert West by email. “Nothing has been dropped. I’m glad to hear that his fortunes have improved. Now we can start going after him again for what he owes.”
