HOW THE COMMUNITY KEPT ERROL'S OPEN IN 2017, AND WHY THE MILLERS CLOSED IT SATURDAY

On Saturday, October 24, Errol's Caribbean Delights at 661 Flatbush Avenue, on the corner of Hawthorne Street, sold its last hard dough bread. Errol and Dorothy Miller opened it as Errol's Bakery and Catering in the fall of 2001 and ran it for 25 years. They are closing because they are in their 80s and want the time with their grandchildren, as workers told News 12. That is the ordinary part. The part worth an article is 2016 and 2017, when the lease ran out, the landlord went to court, and the community put a bakery back on its feet. The Millers got nine more years because the community stood on a sidewalk in a snowstorm and said the landlord's name out loud.

Errol Miller came from Jamaica and opened the bakery in 2001 on a stretch of Flatbush Avenue a few blocks north of Church, in what the city later named Little Caribbean. The early case was bread and pastry: hard dough bread, coco bread with raisins in it, meat and veggie patties, spice bread, callaloo buns, coconut rolls, rum cake, and the dense fruit cake people order for Christmas. The cooler had sorrel and a ginger beer with a kick. Later the steam table came in, and with it the plates that made the place a dinner stop as much as a bakery: curried goat, oxtail, jerk chicken, chicken foot soup, escovitch fish. In 2018 the Millers renamed it Errol's Caribbean Delights to match what it had become.

Regulars talk less about the menu than the hours and the hand. During the 2016 fight a neighbor described it to a reporter as the kind of place that gives you an extra patty any time of the night. Inga-Lee Black, Jamaica-born, told Time Out this month that it feels like home and that she would come every day until the gate came down. Renee Rogers has been going since high school and remembers her mother buying escovitch fish there. Imani Henry, who would later organize the fight to keep it open, once lived in the apartment above the shop. It was a corner people measured their own time in.

The Millers' lease, at $3,500 a month, expired in May 2016. For fifteen years, Errol Miller said, renewing had been routine, with no trouble at all. Then the ground shifted. "All of a sudden the landlord doesn't want me to be here," he told The Indypendent.

Patch identified the landlord from city records as 2 Hawthorne Street Associates LLC and linked the company to Michael Rothstein; the Millers and the organizers called it Rothstein Management. Months before the lease ended, the Millers asked to renew. Meetings were scheduled and not kept; at one, Dorothy Miller said, the landlord left citing an emergency. Then the summons came. By The Indypendent's account, a court order gave the Millers until the end of November 2016 to leave, and a later extension pushed that to February 28, 2017. In housing court, Miller said, the two sides agreed out loud on a new lease at $5,000 a month, a $1,500 jump. No paper followed. The management company stopped returning his calls. What insulted Dorothy Miller, she said, was never being handed a number she could accept or refuse.

Miller went looking for another space and found what Flatbush Avenue charges now. "You really can't get a place up here under $6,000," he told BK Reader. A $3,500 bakery was being asked to become a $5,000 bakery, and the alternative was a $6,000 bakery somewhere else.

Equality for Flatbush, the anti-displacement group Imani Henry founded, learned in late November 2016 that the Millers had been denied a new lease. The first rally was Saturday, December 17, outside the shop, about a dozen people with signs. By Wednesday, December 21, an online petition asking Rothstein to sign a ten-year lease at $5,000 a month had 281 signatures from city residents. Rothstein did not return the reporter's call.

The second rally was January 7, 2017, on the corner of Flatbush and Hawthorne, in a snowstorm. Between 25 and 30 people came. The signs asked the landlord for one thing, a new lease for Errol's, and the chant told greedy landlords to go away so the bakery could stay. Henry said every elected official for the area had been invited and none came. A third action was set for January 28 at 3 p.m.

The petition, retitled "Rothstein Management: DO THE RIGHT THING!", kept climbing, and the organizers mailed the signatures to the landlord every week, so the name was in his mailbox as often as it was in the news. By the end there were more than 1,500, some from Europe and Trinidad. Henry's description of the mechanism is the plainest one on the record: whenever the landlord's name came up, there was some accountability to the community. That is the whole method. A commercial tenant with no lease has no legal leverage in this city; the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which would have given the Millers a ten-year lease and arbitration on the rent, was stalled in the City Council then and had not moved when the win was reported. What the Millers had instead was a landlord who did not want his name on a sign on his own corner.

About two months after the first rally, the Millers signed a new five-year lease. Amsterdam News reported it on March 2, 2017, as a new, affordable lease; The Indypendent gave the length. Neither side gave the rent, and it has never been on the record. In early March a sign in the window thanked the people who had stood outside it. Dorothy Miller's advice to the next shop in the same spot was short: don't give up, and reach out for help. Equality for Flatbush used the win to start a rapid-response legal fund for small businesses and tenants facing the same thing.

The record does not say what happened when that five-year lease ran out in 2022. The shop stayed, so a renewal or an extension was reached, on terms nobody published. Who owns the building now is not in anything we found. What is clear is the arithmetic of 2016: $3,500 going to $5,000, in a corridor where the next space over asked $6,000. The Millers stayed nine years on the lease the community won them, and then they chose their own last day.

The avenue has a pattern. In 2011 Christie's Jamaican Patties, 45 years on Flatbush Avenue near the arena site, announced it was closing in a rent fight; the owner said the landlord wanted a tenant who could pay arena money. In 2017 the Parkside Empire Flatbush Avenue Merchants Association counted at least 22 vacant storefronts on a ten-block stretch of the avenue, while the new 23-story tower at 626 Flatbush, two blocks from the bakery, was listing studios from $2,044 a month. In March 2024 Lords Bakery, another Flatbush fixture, was suddenly boarded up behind a sign saying it had closed for good. Caribbean bakeries on this avenue rarely pick their own ending; the rent picks it for them.

Errol's is the exception, and the reason is specific and repeatable. A lease ran out. A landlord tried silence, then the courts. A neighborhood group put the landlord's name on a petition, on a sign, in the mail every week, and on a corner where his other tenants could read it, and kept it there until the lease was signed. It cost the Millers an extra $1,500 a month, by the only number on the record. It bought nine years, a rename, a steam table, and a last Saturday with flowers and handwritten cards on the counter, which is what C.J. Mitchell told Time Out she was bringing.

The avenue lost a bakery this week, and it will not get another one at that rent. But the closing at 661 Flatbush is the one you want for every shop like it: the owners turned the ovens off in their 80s, on a date they chose, because nine years ago their neighbors decided a landlord's name was worth more to him than a bakery's rent was. That is the lever. The community pulled it once, and it held for a decade.

SOURCING

Photos are illustrative stock from Pexels, not Errol's.