Crime & Safety

Tribeca Landlord Ignored Fire Hazards For Months Before Monster Blaze, Records Show

George Butsikaris allegedly failed to fireproof a strip club in the basement of his historic building.

TRIBECA, NY — Brooklyn-based landlord George Butsikaris, the longtime owner of a Tribeca building gutted last Friday night in a monstrous, hours-long fire, ignored the city's demands that he fireproof the building for months, Department of Buildings records show. Safety hazards were discovered more than half a year before the mega-blaze during an NYPD raid of what appeared to be a strip club in the building's cellar.

Of the 200 or so firefighters who battled the fire at Murray and Church streets Sept. 1, at least a dozen were rushed to hospitals with minor injuries, according to the FDNY.

Luckily, no one else was hurt. But the structure itself was absolutely ravaged. Friday's fire ripped through all five stories of the office and retail building at 24 Murray St. over three-and-a-half hours, city officials said — leaving it uninhabitable with "extensive" fire and water damage. (For more local news, sign up to receive Patch's newsletters and alerts for your NYC neighborhood.)

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"This is a tragic loss for Tribeca," one local preservation group said.

The FDNY has since deemed the fire "accidental." It was traced back to the kitchen ductwork at Pho King, a Vietnamese restaurant on the ground floor, a spokesman said. These ducts run all the way up to the roof.

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But the building may have been a ticking time bomb. According to city records, the landlord let fire hazards fester for months.

Butsikaris has been fined more than $8,500 for a series of safety violations discovered back in January 2017 at 24 Murray St. (also known as 26 Murray St., 27 Park Place and 107 through 113 Church St.), records show. During a raid, city inspectors found that a nightclub called Remix was operating downstairs without a permit. The club had no fire alarms, no max-capacity signage and no safe exit route in case of a fire, inspectors noted — and, perhaps worst of all, its columns, beams and ceilings had not been fireproofed with flame-resistant materials, as is required.

Photo by Ciara McCarthy/Patch

Repeated attempts by the city to force Butsikaris to fix the building and pay his fines in spring and early summer were unsuccessful, records show.

Joe Castellana, who rents space in the building for his business, Contamar Shipping, told the Tribeca Tribune after Friday's fire that he'd been complaining to his super “for a while” about ductwork that “needed to be cleaned." He said a nasty, smelly substance had been leaking from the ducts onto tiles on the second floor.

Patch was unable to reach Butsikaris or other head staffers at his company, George Butsikaris Realty, by phone or email Wednesday. A woman who answered the line at his office (pictured below), located in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge neighborhood, said there was "no one" available to speak to a reporter, but said she'd take a message. We'll update this post if we hear back from a company rep.

Image via Google Maps

Butsikaris made headlines in 2005 for buying a beloved old Prozys-Army Navy Store in Hackensack, New Jersey; in 2012 for buying a Key Food in Queens and reportedly threatening to turn it into a CVS (he still hasn't); and in 2015 for buying a $9 million-plus shopping plaza in Buffalo, New York.

Aside from that, his holdings are hazy. Like a growing number of landlords in NYC, Butsikaris often registers the buildings he buys not under his own name, but under the names of limited liability companies, or LLCs. Records show he uses other classic tactics to obscure his identity, too — such as transferring beleaguered properties from one LLC to another, misspelling important words and employing frontmen to sign his deals.

At Butsikaris' building in Tribeca, which he's owned since at least the early '90s, neighbors complained for years about the Remix nightclub, formerly known as Quest. Many suspected it was really a strip club.

("Cruise the bottom floor past the jalopy Buddha and his swimming fish to the checkered floor," reads a review of the venue on ClubPlanet.com. "The self-obsessed will love the copious mirrors, good for checking yourself out and spying on possible suitors. Bright colors, posh sofas and a mood of zen will make any party-goer feel right at home in this Tribeca gem.")

So it didn't come as a huge shocker when an ex-bartender claimed in a 2016 lawsuit that she was "subjected to nudity, prostitution, and people performing sexual acts" while working "private sex parties" at Remix.


The lawsuit was eventually thrown out — but it was enough to kick the cops into gear. According to the New York Post, a task force led by the NYPD's Vice Squad descended on the club on Jan. 21, 2017 — the same night Remix was hosting the girls of Saint Venus Theater, a roving strip club/sex party legendary among NYC's young finance set. (Their rally cry? “Artista, Erotica, Utopia!”)

During the three-hour night raid, police barged in on 18 couples in "a make-shift back room cordoned off with curtains and rope partitions," the Post reported, "with topless and scantily clad females performing lap dances and lewd sexual behavior.” Inspectors also uncovered a labyrinth of fire hazards.

The State Liquor Authority reportedly slapped the club's owner — Panagiotis Kotsonis — with a whopping 49 violations after the raid. His booze license was revoked and Remix was shut down.

Undeterred, Kotsonis re-applied for a new license one month later, the Tribeca Tribune reported. He was swiftly rejected.

It's unclear whether Remix has remained closed in recent months, as ordered by the state. Reached by phone Wednesday, the club owner's lawyer, Timothy Alnwick, said he hadn't heard about the fire. "Until I talk to [my client], I don't have any comment," Alnwick said.

But the big, gray loft building gutted by flames Friday has a rich history that far predates Remix.

Several real-estate sites list 24 Murray St. as having been built in 1920. However, Lynn Ellsworth, chair of the Tribeca Trust, a nonprofit fighting to preserve local architecture, said her group's research shows it likely dates back to the mid-1800s.

"There are various indications that it's from the Civil War period," she said. "It definitely has the look of the store-and-loft buildings of the 19th century. It doesn't have the glamorous facade that came later."

According to the Tribeca Trust, early tenants included publishers like the Poultry Monthly, the Scientific Publishing Company and the Christian Union, as well as "various lawyers, engravers, manufacturers of knives and razors, and instrument makers." Since the 1930s, a succession of old-boy rifle clubs have set up shooting ranges in the basement. The building is also rumored to have served as a boarding house for a spell in the 1860s and, later, as the original HQ for Lionel Toy Trains.

Most recently, with Butsikaris as owner, the ground floor was rented out to a Pho King, a pizza parlor, a sushi joint, a bubble tea shop, a shoe repair booth and a couple bodegas and salons — and, of course, Remix. The upper floors hosted "showrooms and factories," according to city documents. (Although neighbors said they strongly suspected at least a few people were living up there.)

Image via Google Maps

"How could the owner have kept it so dilapidated that it became vulnerable to such a fire?" Ellsworth asked in a distraught email blast Friday night, as the building still smoldered.

The Tribeca Trust has been lobbying city officials to protect 24 Murray St. and other nearby buildings from teardown by lumping them into the Tribeca East Historic District. The group even filed a lawsuit against the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission last summer.

Until any progress is made on that front, though, Butsikaris can do pretty much whatever he wants with his burned-out piece of history.

Butsikaris will be subject to "additional enforcement actions" if he doesn't show he fixed the old problems, Department of Buildings spokesman Andrew Rudanksy said Wednesday. However, a recent Patch investigation showed the department almost never finds a way to punish landlords for ignoring violations and fines — especially the ones who hide behind LLCs, as they're the hardest to track down.

And for now, the city's top priority is to make sure Butsikaris doesn't do any more damage. The Department of Buildings has ordered him to install a sidewalk shed beneath his charred Tribeca building and fix up its blown-out windows, Rudansky said. The interior must be repaired and pass a city inspection before anyone can move back in.

"Part of our city's collective history is burning," Ellsworth wrote on the night of the fire. "I mourn this building's loss and feel also grief at what I know will replace it."

Lead photo courtesy of the FDNY


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