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Upper West Side Neighbors Happy to See OTB Go

By Leslie Albrecht | December 17, 2010 5:11am | Updated on December 17, 2010 10:12am

By Leslie Albrecht

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

UPPER WEST SIDE — With an Off-Track Betting parlor on the ground floor and a yoga studio upstairs, 143 West 72nd St. was one of the more diverse buildings on the Upper West Side.

But those ill-matched neighbors bid goodbye to each other last week when the city's OTB facilities closed.

Gone are the days when fit young women in Lululemon gear carried their yoga mats past the gamblers, whom local merchants described as "riffraff," "shady characters" and "derelicts."

"We're psyched," said Danny Purcell, a receptionist at Bikram Yoga NYC. "We've been strange bedfellows."

While they got along well with the OTB facility's employees and managers, some of whom even dropped in for a class or two, employees at Bikram Yoga NYC said that after sharing their building for several years with the betting clientele, they weren't sad to see them go.

On Thursday the stench of cigarette smoke still clung to the OTB lobby more than a week after its closure, while the Bikram Yoga NYC studio above was perfumed with a eucalyptus-scented candle.

Purcell and his co-worker Antonio Abate said the energy in the building had already changed for the better.

"Usually you had to wait until you got upstairs for the peaceful environment," Abate said. "There were cigarette butts and torn tickets in the elevator. Now it's not like that."

Once in a while a gambler would intentionally push the wrong button on the elevator, hoping to catch a glimpse of women in skimpy yoga clothes, Abate said. Once, one of them passed out in the stairwell, he added.

When the OTB facility closed last Tuesday, a crowd of lost looking gamblers gathered outside, Abate said. "It was like the walking dead. They were kind of pawing at the door, waiting to see if it was going to open."

But some merchants on the block said the betting parlor wasn't as bad as neighbors feared it would be when it moved in.

"It was probably the nicest OTB place in the country," said Pat Taieb, an employee at the nearby Off Broadway boutique who remembered the "vicious" fight neighbors waged when OTB wanted to move to the block.

"They made it really fancy because the neighborhood was so against it," Taieb said. "They thought it was going to be sleazy, but it didn't turn out that way. You never knew they were there."

Collean Collins, a sales assistant at Tip Top kids shoes, said she never had a problem with "the OTB gentlemen" as she called them, and felt bad that people in the OTB industry, including a relative of hers, lost their jobs.

"All they were doing was spending their own money," Collins said. "We don't like them gambling, but the government gambles with our money every day."