In the days leading up to Saturday, February 17, everything at the Roosevelt Island Fish Store was on sale. A pound of organic penne rigate, normally $2.69, was $1.50 – or $1, depending on the mood of the woman behind the cash register. A jar of Thai Kitchen pad thai sauce, normally $3.99, could be had for $2. Blocks of cheese, $2. Fancy bottles of infused oils with a lattice-work of rosemary floating inside, $2.50. Just about everything that you could put on fish or serve alongside fish or that wasn’t nailed down was roughly 50 percent off.

The only thing that wasn’t discounted was fish, because there wasn’t any to be had. And there won’t be any in the future, now that the store has been padlocked by court order.

By noon on that Saturday, whatever hadn’t been sold – tins of water chestnuts, jars of sweet-n-sour sauce – had been herded together in the center of the store amid cavernous empty shelves and freezer cases, beneath water-stained and drooping ceiling tiles, within view of ancient signs advertising fried-fish platters of yore. The store’s proprietors, a Korean couple with an unsteady grasp of English, stood awkwardly, surveying the remains of their business. Then, with a sigh, they closed the fish store for good, leaving yet another vacant storefront on a Main Street littered with dead soldiers: The pizza place. Julie’s Sports Bar. The bakery. The shoe repair shop.

Why did the fish store close? The simple answer: They lost their lease.

But that is not the whole story.

Like the blind men who examined different parts of the elephant and came away with different impressions, what happened to the fish store is a tangle of viewpoints and interpretations, all of them conflicting, yet all of them with merit. It’s impossible to tease out the degrees of avarice and ineptitude, misunderstanding and poor judgment, except to say that it all made for one big, simmering stewpot into which all sides dipped a ladle.

Here are some of the competing viewpoints:

The owners were illegal squatters who owed years of back rent and failed to show up in court, or... The owners were a poor Korean couple who did not understand the language or the law, and who were saddled unawares with the debts of their predecessor.

The first, naturally, is the viewpoint of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC), which rents out the storefronts on Main Street. Their position was backed by a Civil Court ruling last month that held the fish store owner liable for monetary damages of $11,030.18 and that issued a one-month notice to vacate.

"They owed a significant amount of arrears, dating back years," said RIOC spokesman Bob Liff, who provided a breakdown of the numbers: The store’s monthly rent, $878.41. Arrears owed by previous owner Kim Yong Chu (whose name is on the lease), $3,000. Arrears owed by current owner K.J. Shin, $8,000.

In addition, according to Liff, the original owner illegally handed the business over to Shin about five years ago without notifying RIOC as per lease requirements.

The Shins tell a different story, one that sounds similar in the broad strokes but which results in a far different conclusion. "It’s really a tragic case," says John H. Kim, the lawyer who argued in court on behalf of the Shins. "What happened was that my client took over the store from another person more than five years ago and has been conducting business there ever since. But it was only last year in July that RIOC brought legal action against the owner, saying he owed arrears for the past two years, going back to 2005 and 2006. My client had the returned canceled checks that covered that period. But later, the corporation came back with the argument that the tenant owes the rents actually going back six, seven years."

In other words, Kim’s position is that by bringing the charges now, so many years after the fact, RIOC was on a fishing expedition to find a way to get rid of the Shins, perhaps to make way for a higher-paying tenant in the future. Why, asks Kim, did RIOC never send a collection notice until so many years after the arrears were incurred?

As to the question of ownership, Kim says that by dint of cashing Shin’s personal checks for two years, RIOC had tacitly acknowledged the Shins’ claim to the lease. Also, the Shins claim to have gone in person to Roosevelt Island Housing Management (RIHMC), along with the original owner, to announce the change of ownership.

Too bad RIHMC is not the entity to which the Shins should have introduced themselves. Not my table, as a harried waitress might say. (An RIHMC representative had not returned the WIRE’s phone calls by press time.)

It’s true that Shin did not show up for the Civil Court hearing. Kim says his client had no one else to cover for him at the store that day, which sounds like a flimsy excuse except when coupled with the language barrier and the Shins’ lack of appreciation of the finer points of the American legal system. Without Shin available to testify on his own behalf, the judge accepted a computer calculation by RIOC of monies owed, and court was adjourned.

RIOC tried to negotiate with the fish store, but the fish store wouldn’t cooperate, or... The fish store tried to negotiate with RIOC, but RIOC wouldn’t cooperate.

"RIOC management reached out to them on a variety of possibilities, but no agreement was reached," says Liff. "Ultimately, the issue is pretty simple – not to put it coldly, but you have to pay your rent, and RIOC has the responsibility to act in a businesslike-manner." (On page 3, The RIOC Column in this issue of The WIRE discusses the Fish Store case.)

The wife of the current owner told The WIRE in broken English that there were indeed many negotiations – "they say yes, then they say no" – but that, ultimately, RIOC wouldn’t budge. First, they wouldn’t recognize the Shins as the rightful holders of the lease, which provided for renewal options through the year 2014. Second, they insisted the Shins pay the debts of the previous owner – and this, by the way, is why we still don’t have a pizza place or a bakery. No small-business owner wants to take on the arrears of predecessors. It’s a vicious circle whose result is shuttered storefronts and lack of services for the Island.

Mrs. Shin also said that toward the end, RIOC wanted the Shins to promise to sell only fish and no groceries – perhaps because of the existing non-compete clause in the Gristede’s contract. "No groceries, only fish," she said, pointing to the now-empty shelves. "But fish is so slow, if only fish, we leave."

There might be a case to withhold rent if the ceiling is caving in, but that money should go toward repairing the ceiling; in any case, no leaks were ever reported, or... After years of complaining of leaks and flooding, and no one coming to fix it, the fish store could not be expected to spend heavily on repairs if they could not be guaranteed a lease long enough to justify the investment.

 Liff said there was no record that the Shins had ever complained their store was unsanitary or uninhabitable. After further checking – because the Shins insisted they had reported the leaks many times – he found that the Shins did report them, but to the wrong entity. Instead of going to RIOC, they went to Roosevelt Island Housing Management, the managing company for Eastwood, the building in which RIOC rents out street-level storefronts, and then only after the lawsuit began.

In any case, said Liff, the lease spells out that the owner is responsible for repairs.

There’s no doubt there was extensive water damage over the years; one has only to look at the ceiling. The Shins described frequent flooding, with water pouring through holes and panels near exposed electrical wiring.

The leaseholder is responsible for repairs, or... RIOC is responsible for repairs.

None of the proprietors on Main Street who were interviewed for this story seemed to know who is responsible for what – least of all the Shins. This doesn’t mean they didn’t owe back rent, only that they didn’t recognize that they often compounded their problems by not following the rules. When they spoke to The WIRE about approaching "them" and how "they" never fixed anything, the Shins seemed to be referring interchangeably to RIOC and Roosevelt Island Housing Management. There was no sense of legalities or chains of responsibility.

But they are not alone. Many of New York’s commercial tenants likewise have poor English skills, don’t know to whom they should report problems, and in any case, are afraid to rock the boat. What happened to the fish store has sent shivers up and down their spines, since many (if not most) of them are operating without leases. And no one, perhaps not even RIOC itself, seems to understand the byzantine commercial structure on Roosevelt Island.

One proprietor (who, like most of them, refused to be identified for fear of retribution) pointed to extensive water damage on the ceiling, and described working anxiously, month-to-month, without a lease. Another proprietor, currently at the tail-end of a long-term lease, says RIOC has not returned phone calls seeking renewal.

There is another proprietor on the Island who, rumor has it, had an "in" with a previous RIOC administration, and is said to have secured a virtually open-ended lease at a breathtakingly low rent. Many speak resentfully of the sweet deal brokered by Gristede’s, under which they paid no rent at all for their first two years.

The WIRE asked RIOC to answer this question: What has gone so wrong on Main Street? Here is RIOC’s answer:

"Part of the problem is that stores that do not pay their rent cannot expect to be allowed to enjoy continued occupancy. There is also a recognition that RIOC does not have in-house expertise in managing the retail businesses, and that is why the Board is seeking bids from firms that can advise us on doing just that. The Board’s goal is to bring quality stores to Main Street and beyond to better serve residents and visitors."