July 11, 2006
Divorce at Center of Upper East Side Building Blow Up
As the dust has literally settled from what used to be a four story building at 34 East 62nd, the rather sordid and sad story of the building's owner, Dr. Nicholas Bartha, emerged. Bartha seemed to have blown up the building in a suicide attempt and a lasting effort to make sure his ex-wife wouldn't get the $5 million house in a settlement. After a judge had ruled that the landmark house should be divided and split as part of the his divorce settlement with Cordula Bartha weeks ago, a sheriff's deputy served Bartha with eviction papers on Friday. And their marriage seemed tumultuous - one judge felt Bartha "intentionally traumatized" his wife, a Holocaust survivor, with swastikas and more. The Times linked to the divorce ruling that gave partial ownership of the building to Mrs. Bartha.
Bartha was found by two rescue workers in the rubble; the NY Times has a great graphic of how the building was used - and where Bartha was found. He had serious burns and was taken to a hospital; the only other non-rescue worker injured was a Parks employee walking to work. While Bartha will be investigated and may face jail, he's so injured that the authorities aren't questioning him yet.
The Daily News has excerpts of Bartha's suicide email, which show a very dramatic and angry man. People thought it was a terrorist attack - a natural fear after word that there were early plots to bomb transit tunnels.
Today, there is clean-up and investigation of the lot. Yesterday, our commenters gave us tips about the incident and dispute over the building. And our question - can Cordula Bartha claim any insurance money from the explosion?
Update: The Real Estate at the Observer uploaded the PDF of Bartha's email. It makes for some pretty crazy reading.
Top and bottom photographs by bhaggs on Flickr; middle photograph by Seth Wenig/AP
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Does anyone know if his references to terrorists returning to US Soil in his suidcide note will make him eligible for terror charges in his attempted suicide bombing?
May I be the first to volunteer to pick the burn scabs off of him before dousing him with salt?
What a total twat! Why not just murder his wife and then kill himself? Why did he have to endanger countless others?
I gave up after this line:
"in a suicide try" the proper way is "in a suicide attempt"
He weighed 350 pounds? Holy crap. Gain a little more and he might meet his death anyway.
This is actually quite sad. I wonder how the wife feels. I wonder why people can't get better help before it comes to this.
(P.S. I would have trouble going to any doctor who has a weight problem.)
IT WAS A TERRORIST ATTACK! What's the difference if a man does that to his wife and surrounding neighbors then a bunch of muslims? Just cause he isn't arab is not good enough to brand him not a terrorist. The guy is scum. He's a doctor for chrissakes. I mean the guy must have spent countless dollars in medical school and worked really hard for his earnings to buy a building in midtown that's probably worth 10-20 million dollars and the dude just blows it up cause his wife who never did anything but give him handjobs gets half? crazy!
I don't know... spending half of her life with a loser like that is worth at least 5 million dollars.
i love how he dropped the term "dissed" in his suicide email.
Beyond this guy going over the edge, i think the courts and the vindictive x-wife had a part to play in this. When the wife appealed the prior order in order to get the house which the DR purchased with his parents before we was married and which she had no rights on the deed and was already payed 1.2M plus 2k per month before hand, it seems he felt he was going to lose his home and went into suicidal depression... very sad.
The guy just needed to get a blow job.
Any doubts that the guy was out of his mind would be cleared up by reading the full text of his e-mail. Nicholas Bartha needed medication and counseling, not condemnation and ridicule. He is stark raving mad. I agree with Felipe that the ex-wife did play a role in putting him over the top, but he went crazy long before that.
He has first degree burns over 60% of his body, and is not likely to survive.
I was trying to view the link to the Daily News but it "says page cannot displayed."
But I guess by saying "Dr. Dickhead" it sounded like I was trying to make light of this, but I wasn't. I'm familiar w/feelings of revenge, but oh.my.god! I'm wondering how fucked up someone must be to not even consider the lives of innocent passerby. And people put their trust in this guy as a physcian! The irony now is that he has to suffer the extreme pain of being severely burned as long as he survives.
As an aside..
I'm telling you, I've had the toughest time with technology since mercury retrograde. (But it's over on July 22.) All my posts yesterday were totally messed up. And my printer decided to stop printing things that contained yellow & black ink. Needless to say that everything I print can only be hot pink or purple.
Yeah, the guy's nuts, and yeah he's an asshole for doing something that could hurt so many innocent people. But there's something to be said about the culture of divorce in this country, where his ex-wife, who apparently did not work for 15 years, then kept what she did earn, is entitled to more than half of his earnings.
It sounds sick to say, but I'm almost glad she's not getting the townhouse.
playing devils advocate:
there's also a chance he didn't intend on blowing up the building, but rather, turned the gas on to poison himself, but then something turned on like a refrigerator or a/c or anything that's on a timed switch.
Yeah, the guy's nuts, and yeah he's an asshole for doing something that could hurt so many innocent people. But there's something to be said about the culture of divorce in this country, where his ex-wife, who apparently did not work for 15 years, then kept what she did earn, is entitled to more than half of his earnings.
It sounds sick to say, but I'm almost glad she's not getting the townhouse.
I hope he survives, so he has to live with what he's done and go to jail for it.
Yes, oral sex, medication and counseling would have gone a long way toward preventing this - no joke. Honestly, I could only skim the text first because there are only so many hours in a day and second because I've seen diatribes like this before. To a letter, such things follow the exact same pattern - paranoia, mythmaking, turning small instances into massive conspiracies, rewriting history, me-against-the-world - when you've read a few of these things from different authors you start to see patterns in the way they write, right down to sentance structure - suggesting that the various authors who are very different(i've read them from 20-year old communist students, 40-year old family middle of the road members, etc) share some sort of pathology in the same way that chiken pox looks the same on everyone. All of this is to say, the man was sick and crazy in the very real and sad sense of the word. Let's look at it as if the guy had a form of cancer that managed to blow up a building - don't feel sorry for him, but do look around and see if anyone you know has written anything like this.
Yes, oral sex, medication and counseling would have gone a long way toward preventing this - no joke. Honestly, I could only skim the text first because there are only so many hours in a day and second because I've seen diatribes like this before. To a letter, such things follow the exact same pattern - paranoia, mythmaking, turning small instances into massive conspiracies, rewriting history, me-against-the-world - when you've read a few of these things from different authors you start to see patterns in the way they write, right down to sentance structure - suggesting that the various authors who are very different(i've read them from 20-year old communist students, 40-year old family middle of the road members, etc) share some sort of pathology in the same way that chiken pox looks the same on everyone. All of this is to say, the man was sick and crazy in the very real and sad sense of the word. Let's look at it as if the guy had a form of cancer that managed to blow up a building - don't feel sorry for him, but do look around and see if anyone you know has written anything like this.
Best wishes to the Parks Department employee. The asshole's money should pay for all of her recovery and beyond. Motherfucker.
let's invade divoredmenistan!