Neighbors Say Private Club Destroys North Tribeca's 'Unique Atmosphere'

Left: The building at 451 Washington St., aka 135 Watts, houses Maxwell Tribeca on the ground floor. Six co-op apartments are above. The 1891 landmark, the former Fleming Smith Warehouse, was home to the restaurant Capsouto Frères for 32 years. Right: Partying at Maxwell Tribeca. Photos: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib (building); Maxwell Tribeca via Instagram (party)

Maxwell Tribeca is a private club sparking a very public outcry.

Promised by its owner to be a “small and intimate” gathering spot for vetted members, Maxwell Tribeca, at 451 Washington St., has drawn the ire of residents, both those upstairs and in the surrounding neighborhood. They complain that raucous parties and drunken revelers have, in the words of one, “destroyed the unique atmosphere of north Tribeca.”

Opened in June, 2023, Maxwell Tribeca calls itself an “over-the-top clubhouse,” with a $3,000 annual membership fee and a $1,000 to $12,000 one-time buy-in, the price depending on types of liquor storage and other benefits. The club hosts dinners, lectures, and parties—including soirees thrown by members for their own guests. 

With its liquor license up for renewal last month, complaints about the club, which began coming to Community Board 1 in September 2023, became the focus of nearly four hours of back-and-forth at CB1 meetings over three months. (The community board is advisory to the State Liquor Authority on license grantings and renewals.) 

Neighbors asserted that the club is largely a noisy event space, while the owners called that claim unfair and overblown, and insisted they are working diligently to correct admitted problems.  

“Throughout the night, people come out onto the sidewalk and then they kind of continue to party there,” a nearby Greenwich Street resident told CB1’s Licensing and Permits Committee. “It’s a big social gathering. So a lot of people who are there, they’re not at a restaurant having dinner. They’re there to congregate with people they know or they’re meeting. And then it spills out.”

“The music noise has been so loud that teacups rattled on the second floor,” said upstairs resident Joan Kreiss, “and the pillow I put over my head on the fourth floor vibrated to the beat.”

At the November Licensing and Permits Committee meeting, co-owner David Litwak acknowledged that his business has created problems “We’ve not been perfect by any means,” he said. As first-time “hospitality” operators, he noted, the club went through multiple management teams trying to deal with what he called the “complexity” of starting the club. 

“We’re making a good faith effort here to throw less of the types of events that end up ending around one and shifting more and more of our business towards different types of events that end earlier,” Litwak said.  

But one event happened as recently as last month, neighbors complain, with what Roger Perlmutter, who lives upstairs, described as “an enormous amount of noise, people standing outside, drinking on the Washington Street side.” 

Perlmutter added: “The fact that we’re having these kinds of events take place, despite a lot of community concern, I think demonstrates the problem here, which is that even though David says that he and [co-founder Kyle Channing-Pierce] have been working hard to try and control these things, they just can’t.”

Litwak said he “apologized profusely” to the neighbors, shut down the bar early and blacklisted the troublemakers. “In this business there will be incidents,” he said, while insisting that he is trying to improve the operation. “We have come very, very far,” he said.

The club is on the ground floor of a six residential-unit landmark building, the 1891 former Fleming Smith Warehouse that for 32 years housed the restaurant Capsouto Frères, and later the eatery China Blue. 

Lengthy CB1 meeting discussions centered around the acrimonious relationship between some upstairs neighbors and the club owners. Sleepless nights, broken promises and depressed property values, the residents said, are reason enough to reject the license renewal. 

Litwak countered that “the lack of bad faith is egregious. The building has figured out every possible way not to consider a solution to the problem.” The owner said he is willing to spend $300,000 on soundproofing; the residents responded that soundproofing will only encourage Maxwell Tribeca to continue to disregard its license stipulations.

To complicate matters, the space’s landlord, Cathy Capsouto, is also a building resident. Capsouto is the widow of Sammy Capsouto, one of the three (now deceased) Capsouto brothers who together built out the original restaurant space in 1980. She insisted at a committee meeting that not everyone in the building is opposed to the club’s operation, citing the neighbor directly above on the second floor “who has repeatedly reported to me that he has a very cordial relationship with Maxwell and they have been responsive to all his concerns.”

“I am very invested in the smooth operation of the building and I am concerned for the well-being of my fellow cooperators,” Capsouto said. “I believe that lawsuits are not in the best interest of the building when a compromise is the reasonable way forward.”

Committee chair Susan Cole said the community board can’t referee a complex conflict among co-op shareholders. “You could get tied up in your underwear on this one,” she told them.

“The real issue,” she said to Litwak at the committee’s December meeting, “is what’s happening on the streets and what’s happening in the community and how people are upset by it. Because you’re not controlling what happens. And that is our concern.”

In its resolution, passed last month, CB1 said the club should close at midnight, not 1 a.m., for six months, to demonstrate it can “adhere to the stipulations they have continuously violated, actively control the patrons of their establishent and adequately address the many quality of life concerns of the community.” Otherwise, the board said, it opposes the renewal.

According to the resolution, the applicant refused to make assurances that it would stop serving alcohol at 12 a.m., “as their operational issues are still being worked out.” Donald Bernstein, the lawyer for the owners, did not respond to a request for comment.