The first time I met Max Stark was the first time he came to the door to collect the rent, around 13 years before his brutal murder in early 2014. The urgent dingdingding knockknockknock dingdingding knockknockknock became known quickly among the residents of 315 Seigel Street as the Landlord Knock, the bell depressed so quickly that it didn't have time to ring so much as wheeze percussively. It was imitated widely.
Max arrived with his partner Sam, and for the first while I wasn't sure which bearded Hasid was which. They looked like a comedy team of sorts, an Orthodox Laurel and Hardy, Sam tall and bearded, Max short and bearded. They played off each other.
With his Yiddish accent, I was never sure if he knew my name or if he was calling me Jason. We all developed imitations of Max's particular type of matter-of-fact friendly landlordism. "Jesse/Jason!" goes mine, with a friendly palm-up wave of both hands. "How are you?"
When Max was abducted from a Williamsburg street during a snowstorm in January 2014, his body found burned in a dumpster and his business dealings reported in the New York tabloids, I learned that Sam was Israel Perlmutter, that Max was actually Menachem, and that many considered them slumlords. "Who didn't want him dead?" the Post asked on the cover.
One answer to that question: Me and my friends, who were Max’s tenants in a three-story loft building at 315 Seigel directly upstairs from the Morgan Avenue L stop. Most of us moved in when the A.M. Knitwear Corporation moved out, during the early summer of 2001, and lived there for the next decade. I don't doubt a single one of the accusations leveled against Max, except the one that he was heartless.
It'd be wrong to call Max "beloved," but he could border on endearing. He was just the landlord, and a pretty tolerable one at that. Max was a daily presence in our lives during those years, as the Morgan Avenue stop transformed around us from the East Williamsburg Industrial Park into an extreme model of Brooklyn gentrification, complete with a world-renowned pizza and greenhouse complex at Roberta's and a 24-hour quasi-organic grocery.
The proper Bushwick border was (and is) four blocks to the south, at Flushing Avenue. The building was technically on the far rim of eastern Williamsburg, but it didn't feel like that. My second floor room in the back was higher than just about anything in the landscape, a sea of low warehouses and garages extending towards a glimpse of the Midtown skyline. The building didn't get a proper certificate of occupancy until a few years after we arrived.
"Those were the buildings for the new or for the broke or for the new and broke," recalls a former real estate broker who occasionally worked with Max on buildings in others parts of Williamsburg.
"Seasoned New Yorkers were not calling me to move into those places, adults did not want those places… But [Max] was also the first to really take the chance on converting the industrial buildings, had the foresight to buy them when they were cheap, and understood what the kind of people renting those units really wanted in terms of space and finish. He also went into areas where people thought he was crazy."
The ex-broker continues, "The amount of times people showed up at a building when the unit still wasn't finished—despite me and the tenant calling to check that it would be—was shameful. It killed me, someone drove here with a U-Haul from Ohio and there's still no toilet in their unit. And the toilet was there, they just hadn't done it because no one had complained. Or no mailboxes, or locks, or leaks in the lobby—the list is just endless."
I'd been able to visit again, thankfully, to confirm the toilet had been finished. I don't think we had a refrigerator for the first few weeks. Or maybe it was hot water? The building certainly wasn't done, but it was summer in New York and I was 22 and what did I care?
The Zoolander-like indoor skateboard ramp (courtesy Mark Suppes)
At least in the experience of myself and most of the dozen or so former neighbors I remain in touch with, Max wasn't a slumlord. He was an opportunistic real estate investor from Williamsburg. If something was going wrong in the building, he was always easy to get on the phone.
From what I can discern, 315 was one of his earliest buildings, and perhaps he treated it (and us) with some fondness because of it. I'm not sure what else he owned at the time, but it couldn't have been much. Seigel Street was the bottom of the barrel in terms of loft space. Subdividing our room, my friends I eventually got our individual monthly rents as low as an idyllic $500 or even just below, but that didn't last terribly long.
By the time he was killed, Max was working on $6,000-per-month dwellings, like the recently evacuated luxury construction at 120 South Fourth Street, and rent at 315 is well past the $3,000 line by now. But in 2001, we were Max's lab.
The first few years, cars were constantly on fire out back, presumably for the insurance money. "They even burned a stretch limo once," remembers Mark Suppes, a freelance programmer working jobs for Gucci and others. He'd moved to Brooklyn a year out of college and built a recording studio in his corner loft at Seigel Street. Mark interacted with Max often.
"He was a pretty funny guy," Mark says. "There was something about his demeanor that was almost comical, and I almost felt like he was in on the joke, too. We discovered at some point that he was basically our age, and we were all shocked, because we assumed he must've been much older than us."
One semi-adult who did move in (and stay) was Joey Anuff, an early Wired employee and co-founder of pioneering internet snark dispensary Suck.com. Anuff found himself jobless after the first dot-com bust and living in a way-too-expensive place in the West Village. Through a broker, he found 315 Seigel Street.
"I think I paid $1,600 or $1,650," he remembers. "I was not the first Puerto Rican to live in Bushwick, but I was probably the first Puerto Rican to be paying $1,650 for a place in Bushwick," he says.
While Max benevolently looked the other way, 315 Seigel Street became an incubator for the new Brooklyn.
Recording studio and office with sleep loft. (courtesy Mark Suppes)
"He was like the Y Combinator dude for the East Coast," Joey says. "The unheralded Orthodox Jewish Paul Graham of Bushwick, but more rock and roll. Every third tenant had a band. That was half the reason that people got places there. There was no conceivable way that a neighbor of anybody on the block would complain about something being too loud."
The three-story loft at 315 Seigel Street was a constant sitcom co-starring Max Stark as the beleaguered, bemused landlord. The place smelled like a bongwater swamp from the moment you stepped through the front door, which I'd always (not illogically) attributed to sheer volume of weed smoke.
After I moved out, I found out that my side of the second floor alone contained two pot growing operations. And that's not to mention the dealers, of which there were at least two on each floor. There were start-ups. There were biker-hipsters who arrived just before the 2004 Republican National Convention and, in building lore, are the ones to blame when the bedbugs arrived. (They never made it to my room, thankfully.)
There were musicians and artists, of course. There was a glass-blower and students and teachers and environmentalists and freelancers (like myself) and carpenters and house painters and a music business accountant and more.
The building even had its own male model, who (just like in Zoolander) outfitted his room with a half-pipe for him and his skate-boarding buddies. His face appeared on billboards and in magazines constantly. Mark recently spotted him on a billboard in Thailand.
When Joey landed a new job at VH1, our hall had its own TV producer. A family with a kid moved in upstairs. Briefly. Recalls one friend, "I remember doing mushrooms with some friends who came to visit and we took a kettle of mine and were throwing it down the hall like it was a bowling ball." For all intents and purposes, the building was lawless.
The old canard that New York is always cooler before you moved here might be true, but the 10 years I got at Seigel Street gave me exactly what I expected and wanted out of New York: chaos. And it was Max Stark who made that possible. In that way, the building became one of an infinite amount of pivot points between the crazy old New York and its more buffed-up post-9/11 reiteration. I met a few good friends on the morning of 9/11, when we'd all gone up to the roof to peer at the columns of black smoke to the west where the World Trade Center used to be.
The DIY architecture sprouted quickly. "The way it stayed cheap as possible was the subdivision of spaces into cubbies," says Joey. "If you watched a show like Girls or any show that aspires to depict the day-to-day of hipster living, that's an element that's missing: the no-window cubby, the little fortress room."
Hallway marker board belonging to in-house food delivery start-up ZipMenu. (courtesy Mark Suppes)
Some rooms, like one upstairs with undulating plastic bedroom capsules, were inspired. Other rooms looked like tree forts. My friend Derek went through two iterations of his, landing on a version that included something like a bridge and a fire pole. But more often (as in my gradually evolving room) the results were rough experiments in beams, boards, and drywall.
At first, Max hired a super who turned out to be a crackhead that stole people's mail.
"My recollection of [him] centers around the silver moon boots that he wore which, upon reflection, were probably both unsellable and unstealable," Joey says. "Only in deep retrospect can you see that as the insanely fashionable L-train style move that it really was."
Eventually, Max hired a very nice and far more competent man for the job, who is perhaps still on duty. Max and the real estate company did try to improve the building. They got vending machines for the basement with $1 Busch (and Busch Lite) and other beverages. The scary industrial washers and dryers caught fire a few times, only once (that I recall) requiring a full visit from the fire department.
But after a while Max and his partners started to get the hang of it, and after that I remember them being on a constant mission to upgrade the property. They added faux-marble floors in the hallways, and—a few years in—started pushing the rent up, which seemed inevitable from the moment the organic grocery opened on the corner.
By then, Max and Sam and SYC Realty (at least, that's who I wrote my checks to) had started buying up other property in the neighborhood and upgrading them the way they did 315 Seigel Street. As I noticed when I made friends with residents or ended up at parties in those buildings, each was slightly more upscale than the previous. Though residents at Seigel Street got justifiably pissed at Max and withheld rent with some frequency, nobody expected him to be a perfect landlord or for everything in the building to constantly work, like (say) the unpredictable but endlessly handy freight elevator.
A visit from the fire department, details unknown (courtesy Mark Suppes)
Sometimes, though, things broke down totally and completely, such as the fabled River of Shit. Mark Suppes had gone upstairs to see a friend during the debacle to discover Max standing in the open doorway with his friend, a professional furniture designer. In the background, a snaked hose had poked a hole through the tenant's toilet and was spraying the walls of the immaculate bathroom with feces. "Max is trying to calm him down," says Mark. "'Is no problem! Is no problem!'"
Like others who speak Eastern European languages, Max would often drop the article from his sentences, though I sometimes wondered if he was doing it deliberately.
"Is Max!" he would announce on voicemails, and this eventually became the hook of a song recorded by building resident Lawrence Becker, now a professional animator.
Various hacks could be used to avoid the Landlord Knock. One piece of shared knowledge was that Max was absolutely terrified of dogs. I once saw him literally turn heel and sprint in the opposite direction when he saw a dog coming from the far end of the hall. Many residents relished Saturdays, the one day our Hasidic landlords were guaranteed not to come knocking.
But besides the River of Shit (and the occasional building-saving FDNY hosedown), all the chaos more or less seemed part of the lease when moving into a loft in East Williamsburg. I often gave Max guff for the constant upgrades and told him I moved there because it no frills and cheap. He laughed. We generally got along, because I paid my rent on time relative to some neighbors, which is to say I usually only paid three or four weeks late.
"The real side of Max that nobody hears about is the landlord side," Joey Anuff says. "He was dealing with a group of people that might legitimately have been the worst tenants in America at that time. The least dependable, least bankable white people in all of New York. I almost felt bad for paying him on time. Paying rent, I felt like I was being gotten over on, compared to my other neighbors. 'You paid Max?! Wow!'"
One neighbor went a whole year without paying Max once. The building had received its certificate of occupancy by then and Max could have evicted him, but didn't. He did, however, make my broke friend's life a living hell, showing up early nearly each morning to do the Landlord Knock, and haranguing him endlessly.
Beautiful DIY architecture on the 3rd floor (courtesy Mark Suppes)
Others remember Max playing the good cop. "There were times when we were months behind, owing them thousands of dollars, and [the woman] at the office was threatening eviction, moving forward with filing papers," remembers Derek Dickinson, who got a spot in the building as a student and remained afterwards as he became a contractor. "Max would be the one who was cool to me. He'd call me and say, 'You're killing me, I had to leave the office to talk to you. [They] just want you out.' He was our advocate."
"He was a softy," recalls Emily Dean, a solar energy consultant, who moved into the building a few years later after spending time there. "We would have really cordial dealings, but I gave Max a lot of flak because he wouldn't shake my hand."
Mark Suppes pushed it to the limit. Quitting his freelance programming gigs, Suppes launched ZipMenu, a web-based food delivery start-up that started-up about a half-decade too early. He would eventually sell out to Delivery.com. But not before ZipMenu crashed and burned. Once one of Max's more reliable tenants, Suppes fell far behind with Max, who could be relentless in hunting late rent and often just seemed to enjoy the chase.
"After the damage had been done, I was pretty hard up," Suppes says. "My utilities got cut off. No electric, no hot water, the refrigerator stops working, no heat. But I'm also trying to run a start-up the best I can and I've got a pretty huge computer rig to power up, so I just ran an extension cord out the door and put an adapter into a light fixture. At one point, Max came by to collect the rent, which I didn't have, and saw that there was an extension cord running up to the ceiling, plugged into his power, and he looks at me and goes, [deadpan, in Yiddish accent] 'Mark, why you do this to me?'"
"I don't think it made him mad," Suppes says, recalling some amusement in Max's tone. "I think mostly he was just looking for another way to rib me."
Joey Anuff had landed a job in programming at VH1 and remained in Max's good graces. "Max had a genuine curiosity about his tenants," Joey says. "I'd talk to him about making television. He was really curious about television. He didn't own a television, but he thought it was a really interesting concept. He was definitely not the only person I met in Bushwick who didn't own a television and who told me that, but he was definitely the least judgmental about it."
"I think it challenged all he knew about reality to know that there were people as bad with money as his tenants," Joey says. "In the end, though, it seems like he was that worst of all, but that just makes you wonder if anybody can be good with money. If not Max, then who? If he didn't have his shit together, then the whole world is probably a sham!"
A brief vogue for tiny bike rides in the second floor hallway (courtesy Mark Suppes)
By the end of my tenancy at 315 Seigel Street, my share of the rent had risen to nearly $800. I still saw Max, but he stopped coming around to collect. Instead, he started sending the super, who would simply hand me a cell phone that had an unamused representative from the real estate office on the other end, demanding money immediately.
When I moved out, it happened to be near Max's developments on South 4th Street and I ran into him in the neighborhood frequently. I can't actually recall if I gave him shit about trying to price me out of my new neighborhood, too, but I think I did. I certainly intended to. Now, two years after his death, I'm sad he can't create any more chaos. Max Stark deserves a Coen brothers script or, as Joey Anuff suggests, a season of Serial.
My last concrete memory of Max is coming home one day to find him talking to my current landlord in front of my new place, both with smiles on their faces. Max greeted me warmly, as usual "Jason/Jesse!"
"Max has nothing but nice things to say about you," my new landlord said. "He says you always paid your rent on time." It's possible Max actually winked.
Jesse Jarnow (@bourgwick) is the author of Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock (Gotham, 2012) and Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America (out March 29th, Da Capo).
