Pawtucket, RI
When Providence Planning Department officials were trying to get the Silver Top Diner to move to make way for a condominium development, Herbert P. Weiss saw it as an opportunity to lure the storied all-night eatery to Pawtucket.

Over the course of a month, Weiss, Pawtucket’s manager of economic and cultural affairs, showed up at the Silver Top two or three times a week, always ordering a ham, cheese and mushroom omelet and promising that Pawtucket would put out the welcome mat if the diner moved, said Patricia A. Brown, the Silver Top’s owner.

Brown eventually gave in and moved the diner to a vacant lot owned by the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency on Middle Street.

But plans to reopen the eatery stalled. Now she and the redevelopment agency are in court, each side blaming the other for the failure of the much ballyhooed project to get off the ground.

The PRA is demanding that Brown repay the $52,000 she drew down from the $100,000 promissory note that the redevelopment agency issued to cover her startup costs and moving expenses.

Brown is saying that agency officials misled her into thinking that the loan wouldn’t have to be repaid until the diner was back in business, and accusing them of taking advantage of her lack of expertise.

After the PRA sued to recover the $52,000, Brown filed a counterclaim, seeking punitive and compensatory damages from the agency for misrepresenting the terms of the deal and breaking its promises.

“They stated verbally over and over that the money wasn’t payable until the diner doors were open,” she said in an interview at her lawyer’s office in Warwick.

“They told me many times to my face and over the phone ‘We will direct you all the way. We will hold your hand all the way through the project,’ ” she said.

R. Kevin Horan, the PRA’s lawyer, said Brown’s charges that she was misled by redevelopment officials are “totally unfounded.”

“She was given an opportunity to have her own counsel. She purported to be a business person,” he said.

The lawsuit, with its charges and counter charges, is a far cry from the friendly atmosphere that prevailed in 2002, when Weiss, campaigning to bring the Silver Top to Pawtucket, ate at the diner so often Brown said she was going to name a menu item after him.

“I told him I would name it the Herb Weiss omelet,” she said.

Brown, 50, of Johnston, said she has been financially ruined by the standoff. She had been supporting herself and her family by working the third shift at an all-night restaurant. But now, for the first time in her life, she said, she is receiving unemployment and looking for another job.

“We need to get this court battle over & the diner up & running so I can have a decent job again,” Brown said in an e-mail message yesterday.

Brown was a waitress at the Silver Top from 1989 until 1994. From 1994 until 2002, she was the operator, running it for Bernie Buoncervello, who owned the 70-year-old diner and leased the land.

But the small triangular-shaped parcel that the diner occupied at Kinsley Avenue and Promenade Street belonged to the Providence Redevelopment Agency, and, in 2002, the agency tried to get the Silver Top to move.

Brown balked. Efforts to find another spot in Providence were unproductive. The controversy was reported in the news media. Weiss, sensing an opportunity for Pawtucket, swept in.

Stephen A. Gordon, the Warwick lawyer who is representing Brown pro bono, said she was so eager to go into business for herself, she believed it when Weiss and his boss, Pawtucket Planning Department Director Michael D. Cassidy, promised that Pawtucket would help her develop the business plan and obtain the financing she would need to reopen he diner in Pawtucket. When Buoncervello offered to sell the diner to her for $500, she jumped at the chance.

Pawtucket officials knew, Gordon said, that she lacked the expertise to develop a business plan for the diner, put the construction work out to bid and obtain financing. Eager to lure the diner to Pawtucket, they promised to do those things for her, Gordon said, then reneged. “All of the promises,” he said in court papers, “were filled with more air than the meringue on [Brown’s] lemon meringue pie!”

Originally published online here: http://www.projo.com/business/content/NO_PAWTUCKET_DINER06_07-06-07_F369G3R.3035d9e.html