Fate of Wrigley Field rooftop businesses in judge’s hands
If a new right- field video board goes up, “We are out of business,” an attorney for two rooftop owners said. “We are insolvent. We are destroyed.”
A new right- field video board might just help breathe new life into the Chicago Cubs’ World Series hopes, the team claims.
But if the board does go up, an attorney for a pair of rooftop owners told a federal judge Monday, “we’re dead.”
“We are out of business,” Tom Lombardo said. “We are insolvent. We are destroyed.”
Lombardo, who represents the owners of Skybox on Sheffield and Lakeview Baseball Club, told U. S. District Judge Virginia Kendall bluntly what would happen to his clients if the video board goes up and blocks their views of Wrigley Field.
But Cubs attorney Andrew Kass of said the rooftop owners’ contract with the baseball team allows for expansion — and he said the jumbotron counts.
Kendall did not rule after a long day of oral arguments on whether the Cubs could move forward. She promised a ruling “as quickly as possible.”
Even as she spoke, work crews continued their battle against the elements to install the infrastructure for the video board before the April 5 home opener against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Lombardo used Monday’s hearing to claim the Cubs sought an illegal monopoly on rooftop ticket prices by using a threat to erect signs as leverage to force the rooftop owners to raise prices.
Cubs attorney Dan Laytin said the argument made no sense, because Cubs baseball belongs to the Cubs.
“You can’t have a monopoly on your own product,” Laytin said.
But the Cubs were losing customers to the rooftops, Lombardo argued. And instead of adjusting their own business plan to lawfully compete, he said, the Cubs violated antitrust laws in an attempt to drive the rooftops out of business.
If the Cubs had offered a wider variety of food and drink, “maybe they could have drawn customers and made customers not want to go to the rooftops,” Lombardo said.
Instead the Cubs “try to compete with us by putting up giant signs, by trying to buy rooftops out of bankruptcy, by threatening us with all this construction ... and by coercing rooftops to sell at less than fair market value,” Lombardo said.
Adding a level of complexity to the case is a 20- year contract between rooftop owners and the Cubs that was signed in 2004 and provides the Cubs with 17 percent of rooftop revenue. It made them, simultaneously, competitors and business partners, said Lombardo.
The two sides argued Monday over several clauses in the contract, including one that states “any expansion of Wrigley Field approved by governmental authorities shall not be a violation of this agreement.”
Abraham Brustein argued on behalf of the rooftop owners that “a sign is the type of thing that we specifically bargained not to have put in front of us.”
But the Cubs’ attorneys said the organization was simply trying to exercise the basic right of building on land that they own.
Last month, Kendall denied the rooftop owners an emergency injunction that would have halted work at Wrigley Field. She vowed at the time to have the matter cleared up before opening day.