Soupe Du Jour dispute is going to court

Patty Phillips: ‘I want to stay here and keep working and have the building in decent repair.’

By John Tredrea
   A long-simmering tenant-landlord disagreement is going to court.
   Patty Phillips, operator of the Soupe Du Jour eatery for 27 years, has responded to an eviction notice from her landlord, Alec Gallup, by suing him for breach of contract.
   The case is scheduled to go before state Superior Court Judge Neil Shuster today (July 5).
   Ms. Phillips, who was served an eviction notice by Mr. Gallup effective June 15, is still operating the eatery on Blackwell Avenue in Hopewell Borough pending the outcome of the lawsuit she filed against Mr. Gallup after he tried to force her out.
   The eviction notice was issued after negotiations on a lease stalled. Ms. Phillips has never had a lease. Her rent is $600 a month and has been since 1988, she said.
   She alleges that Mr. Gallup has refused to make basic repairs for decades. She says she began asking him in the early 1990s to fix the windows, which will not stay open. She said the exterior of the building has not been painted since she moved in and that the ceiling needs to be repaired to prevent pieces of it from falling down.
   She said she has a petition supporting her vs. Mr. Gallup signed by nearly 1,000 people.
   She said that, before the eviction notice was issued, her stance was that she would not sign another lease until the basic repairs to windows and ceiling were made.
   "All I want is to be able to stay here and keep working and have the building in decent repair," she said.
   Her suit against Mr. Gallup is "for breach of contract," she said. "We had the basic tenets of the lease settled," she explained, "except for two items: when the rent increase would go into effect and when the repairs would be done. They decided to evict with basically just two items left unsettled."
   The rent figures on the table before the lease negotiations stalled were $800 per month for the first year, $850 for the second and $900 for the third.
   In a document filed with the court in response to Ms. Phillips’ lawsuit, Mr. Gallup states he replaced the roof of her building in 2005, for $14,000, replaced the hot water heater this year for $2,600 and did other miscellaneous repairs totaling $5,400.
   He said the last annual property tax bill for the tract that also includes a small flower shop, was $22,384.