YORKVILLE — Andrew and Karen Buczek, the husband and wife team that have owned the neighborhood auto shop Uptown Motors for three decades, are losing their space on East 84th Street to a developer.
Manhattan Residential purchased the property at 327 E. 84th St. for $11.6 million on Oct. 22 and plans to convert the three-story building into luxury condos with private parking and outdoor space, according to Shai Shustik, an owner of the company.
The sale caught the Buczeks off guard. The couple, who commutes two hours a day to work from Northport, N.Y., found out the landlord was planning to put the building up for sale once their lease expired in March. They were given a few extra months for free to settle their affairs, he said.
"It makes me feel lousy," said Andrew Buczek, 63. "It's a hard deal to leave here. It's scary moving out of here and relocating the business in this stage of my life."
The landlord asked the Buczeks to make a bid on the building, but they declined because they weren't told how much the building was worth and they didn't want to "bid against" themselves, he said.
"They wanted me to make the highest bid and I've been here since 1970. It's really kind of unfair," Andrew Buczek said.
The Buczeks took the landlord, Cynthia Heinz, to court nearly two months ago, but the judge ruled that Heinz had the right to sell the building to anyone she wanted as long as the sale didn't happen until after the lease expired.
Under an agreement, Uptown Motors was given a few months of free rent and a lump sum to cover moving expenses, Buczek said.
Even if he had purchased the building, it would have "created such a high overhead the business would have had to gross at least $300,000 a month to pay off that kind of loan," he said.
Since then, the couple has been scrambling to bring in more business in preparation for the move, which will happen in about three months, he said.
Uptown Motors has been in business since 1916, when it opened on the Upper West Side at 168th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, according to the Buczeks. The company moved to its East 85th street garage in 1964.
Buczek said he just secured a lease for a new location nearby, across the Willis Avenue Bridge in The Bronx at 125 Bruckner Blvd.
Uptown Motors has served a diverse clientele over the years, including some celebrities like Michael J. Fox, Madonna and Yoko Ono, who brought in the family Mercedes Benz station wagon, Andrew Buczek said.
But roughly 80 percent of his business are Upper East Side residents and he's afraid that the relationships he's developed over his 34 years there will be lost and business will be disrupted when he moves.
One of his foreman that worked with him for 25 years, having caught wind of the sale and coming move, left for another job, he said.
"This is like a marriage," he said. "People have said 'Don't ever leave.' It's not much choice. What can I say? Yorkville is a great little area and it's turning into, like, mass production. The certain feel of the neighborhood is lost."
Plans for the building have not been filed with the city's Department of Buildings yet, but Shustik said two or three more floors will be added to the building to "max it out." He's aiming to open the condos within two years.
