Fight to Save Jimmy’s Corner Continues With Spirited Rally

A group of city politicians and local residents held an April 10 rally to call for a halt to the planned eviction of Jimmy’s Corner, a beloved Times Square dive bar started by the late boxing legend Jimmy Glenn.

Notably, a State Senator and State Assembly member have held up the bar’s plight as an example of why they’re pushing a bill that would limit commercial rent hikes, which could apply to businesses similar to Jimmy’s Corner in the future; the bar has paid a low rent for decades, which allows it to survive on W. 42nd Street.

Adam Glenn, Jimmy’s son and the current owner of the bar, has sued the Durst Organization over the eviction notice. Durst wants to sell the building at 140 W. 44th St. that contains the watering hole, which has been around since the 1970s.

Jimmy Glenn once ran the Times Square Boxing Club on W. 42nd St., as well. Raised by a grandfather who had worked as a sharecropper, Glenn told a boxing blog that he once brawled with the not-yet-heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, saying that he lost and broke his tooth along the way—adding that “he went the distance.”

“There are special places in this city. Small businesses that mean something to the communities that they’re in,” Adam Glenn said at the rally. “Right now, we’re fighting at Jimmy’s Corner. We’re fighting against our landlord...because so often, we create that value, and they take it.”

He called the crowd assembled around him the “Jimmy’s faithful,” and thanked them for showing up when they didn’t have to support his mission. Glenn added that the bar was not “just another” Olive Garden or Starbucks location, but rather his “home.”

Jimmy Glenn was close with Seymour Durst, the second-generation head of the Durst Organization, during his lifetime. Glenn passed away in 2020 and, by last year, the Durst Organization had made clear their plans to flip the building and thereby kick out Jimmy’s Corner.

Lawyers for Durst have said that the elder Glenn’s death has given them cause to terminate the bar’s lease, citing a “demolition clause” in the contract.

In Adam Glenn’s suit, which was filed late last year, his lawyers argued that such an argument is a deliberate misreading of such a clause—which they further added that they hadn’t even laid eyes on, despite reportedly requesting it of the Durst Organization multiple times.

The Durst Organization has previously told Our Town that they offered Adam Glenn $250,000 “even though we were not required to do so,” which they said was not “met with good faith.”

In a request for comment on the latest rally, a Durst spokesperson called the building that houses Jimmy’s Corner “the ideal location for a new housing development.”

“We have done our best to be good neighbors, and we regret it has come to this,” they added.

New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and State Assembly Member Emily Gallagher—both representing Brooklyn districts—used the rally as an opportunity to promote their Small Business Rent Stabilization Act, which would institute a commercial rent control system in New York City. In a social media post accompanying the rally, Salazar said that the bill would “limit rent hikes, guarantee lease renewals, & protect at-will tenants.”

Adam Glenn signaled that he believed the bill would “protect the next Jimmy’s Corner,” by protecting small business operators who “put their soul into” their work from businesses who “don’t care anything about their community.”

“I got my start in New York as the other employee working at a small business,” Gallagher said at the rally. “That is actually where I became a community organizer.”

“This is also personal to me because I love Jimmy’s Corner,” she added. “That became a place that I loved to go, that I loved to bring people...[where] New York would feel like New York. So often now, New York just feels like a strip mall in Iowa. There’s nothing wrong with Iowa, but it is not New York.”

Glenn has promised that if the eviction ends up going through, he’ll look to find a spot for Jimmy’s Corner elsewhere in the city.