3/14/2024 0 Comments Elise finch 2019![]() For the tenants trying to stay, Finch’s death was an omen, the end of an era of a certain type of New York life, one that the city will no longer sustain. The rest are waiting to learn their fate. Others have been offered lease renewals with rent increases in the thousands. Dozens of market-rate tenants received notices from the new landlord, a New York–and–London–based firm called Meadow Partners, stating that they must leave their apartments, including Athas and his family, who have lived in the building for 22 years. Nine months later, some of Finch’s biggest fears have come to pass. “I told him every day that they’re not gonna throw him out, and he wouldn’t believe me.” “He was convinced that he would get tossed out,” Don Perlis, a fellow artist and longtime friend, tells me. Finch, a rent-stabilized tenant of the same apartment for 45 years, was despondent and feared that he would soon be out of a home. To them, Finch had been in the throes of a different crisis: Just five days before Finch jumped out of his window, he’d learned the building had been sold to a private-equity firm for $58 million. But Finch’s cancer was treatable, his neighbors said. The New York Post reported that, according to the NYPD, Finch had been terminally ill. It read, “Legendary Art Critic and East Villager.” The next day, another neighbor strung a piece of paper covered in plastic around a tree near where Finch had landed. News of his suicide filtered through 310 and its companion building across the courtyard, 305 East 11th Street. Athas identified Finch, and the police removed his body from the pavement. He recognized his neighbor’s bedraggled mop of gray hair first, then his white socks. Instead, when Athas got outside, he saw Finch’s body lying on the sidewalk, five floors below Finch’s bedroom window. He would be sitting up in an ambulance outside their red brick building at 310 East 12th Street, cursing at the EMTs. Athas assumed that Finch, who was 69 and in poor health, had fallen, or maybe he’d had trouble breathing and called 911. There had been an incident involving Athas’s next-door neighbor, Charlie Finch, and he needed to come downstairs. Artie Athas answered a call from a detective at the 9th precinct at around 11:45 on the night of August 24, 2022.
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