To the editors:
Furthermore, they would never discuss a law case in progress as Kerson did both in the article (toward the end) and while the trial was going on. He was there, and the third day of five days, he returned to the neighborhood and “spread it around” that “things were not going well” for me and the neighborhood association. I asked him not to discuss the case. My impression was that he didn’t think he had done anything improper. In view of his attitude then, the insensitivity of the Reader article should not have come as a surprise to me.
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Buenger states that I “accepted without question” Winick and Leitson’s claim that they spent tens of thousands of dollars developing the Warner Street property. There were no figures to check, since Winick refused to mention any numbers when I interviewed him. That’s why I reported an estimate rather than an exact dollar figure. There were two sources for this estimate. The first was Buenger, who told me that she thought Winick and Leitson might claim damages against her for as much as $40,000. The second was arithmetic. Winick and Leitson paid $12,500 to acquire the Warner Street property. Tim McGonegle said that if he were earning a fee in this case, it would be about $25,000–so I assumed that Winick and Leitson had legal bills somewhere in the neighborhood. Add in whatever they spent for architectural and design fees, and you have a figure in the tens of thousands of dollars.
