THE LANDLORD CALLED THE BAGEL LINE A LEASE VIOLATION AND THE LINE BUILT A BAKEHOUSE

The crowd outside 73 Greenwich Avenue on a Saturday morning is the kind of thing a West Village landlord used to put in a listing. In November 2024 it went into a default notice instead. BLDG Management Co., the firm run by Lloyd Goldman, told Apollo Bagels that the line in front of its door blocked the neighbors and violated the lease, and that unless the shop directed its customers in an unobtrusive direction by November 30, the lease would be canceled. The only direction the landlord would accept was onto West 11th Street. Apollo had already put up ropes and signs and hired a full-time line monitor. It went to court instead.

Apollo Bagels began as a Williamsburg side project of Joey Scalabrino and Mike Fadem, the people behind the pizzeria Leo. The first shop opened at 242 East 10th Street on March 1, 2024. The second took over a 1,000-square-foot former pizzeria on Greenwich Avenue that July, through an LLC whose listed contact was Goldman, at an asking rent of $230 a square foot. The lease assignment closed on July 1, 2024, in a space that had been Zazzy's Pizza. By August the line was a West Village fixture. By November it was a legal exhibit. The landlord on the other side of the notice is not a small one: BLDG Management, founded in 1984, holds more than 250 residential and commercial properties, was a partner in the 2001 World Trade Center lease, and in January 2024 was sued by the city comptroller over wages at a 421-a building. A 1,000-square-foot bagel shop was, by any measure, the least of its concerns, which is what made the notice read as a lesson rather than a complaint. The notice said customers were blocking the doors of neighboring shops. Apollo argued that rerouting the line onto the narrower, residential West 11th Street had been tried once and had blocked a wine bar's outdoor seats and residents' front doors.

A commercial tenant in New York who gets a notice to cure has a problem the residential tenant does not: the cure period runs out, the lease terminates, and the fight happens after the room is gone. The Yellowstone injunction, named for a 1968 case, is the device that stops that clock. A court tolls the cure period so the tenant can litigate whether there was a default at all without losing the lease in the meantime. Apollo filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on November 18, 2024. A real-estate law blog reported that Justice Louis L. Nock granted the injunction within the week. No outlet has reported how the case ended, whether by settlement, discontinuance or judgment. What can be reported is simpler. The shop at 73 Greenwich Avenue is on Apollo's own location list today, open seven days, seven to five, and the line is on the corner where it always was.

The expansion is the part of the story that the landlord's notice did not anticipate. Williamsburg, at 133 North 7th Street, opened officially on January 2, 2025. John Street in the Financial District was open by March. Hoboken followed in October, West 35th Street in November, then Kips Bay at 416 Third Avenue, Reade Street in Tribeca on July 1, 2026, and Industry City in August. That is nine shops, with a tenth signed at 19 Waverly Place. The prices did not move with the count: a bagel is $2.50, a bagel with cream cheese $5, a dozen $26, at every counter.

In August the company opened the piece that makes nine counters possible: a 5,075-square-foot production kitchen inside Industry City in Sunset Park, turning out 15,000 bagels a day and more than 100,000 a week, delivered overnight to every store. It replaced a Williamsburg facility that did 10,000 a day. Tribeca Citizen, reviewing the Reade Street shop in July, reported that the bagels are still boiled and baked in each location. Apollo has never claimed its bagels are hand-rolled, and its press release describes naturally fermented, boiled bagels made in a centralized facility. The honest description, from the sources available, is that the dough is made once and the finish happens on site.

Two things happened at once on Greenwich Avenue, and they point in different directions. A landlord with a portfolio of more than 250 properties tried to use a lease clause to discipline a tenant for being too popular, and the tenant found the one legal tool that lets a small business fight without first losing the room. That is the part every counter in the city should know by name. Yellowstone is not a bagel story. It is the difference between a default notice and an eviction.

The other thing is the bakehouse. The city's bagel shops have spent a decade arguing about hand-rolling, and Murray's, Tompkins Square, Bagel Pub and the rest still do it in front of you. Apollo's answer to a landlord's deadline was scale: central dough, nine counters, a tenth coming, $2.50 at every one. The line beat the lease. Whether the bakehouse beats the hand-rollers is the fight that starts now, and it will be decided at the counter, by the people in the line.