When it received a default notice from its landlord (threatening termination of the lease), the tenant commenced an action in the New York County Supreme Court to stop the landlord from ending the agreement. (It sought a special injunction, known as a "Yellowstone," to toll the termination of its tenancy until such time there has been a resolution of the dispute by the court.)
The landlord argued that, by law, any court-issued injunction had to be conditioned on the tenant's payment of the rent. (It was the landlord's contention that the school had purportedly delayed getting its architectural plans to the landlord by some three months and that as a result the rent was due and payable.)
Both the Supreme Court and the Appellate Division, First Department, denied the landlord's request since none of the governing preconditions for the rent's payment had been triggered. (Neither the 'Quarters Approval' or the temporary certificate of occupancy had been delivered or received.)
Apparently, the only available remedy reserved by the parties' agreement was to shorten the "free rent" window by the corresponding period of the tenant's delay. (For example, rent would now be due upon tenant's receipt of the 'Quarters Approval,' rather than three months thereafter.)
You mean until those delineated conditions occur, the tenant can continue to hold the space, rent-free?
If that's what the parties' lease agreement provides, absolutely!
How's that for giving landlord the business?
For a copy of the Appellate Division's decision, please use this link: Global Bus. School, Inc. v R.E. Broadway Real Estate, II, LLC
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*These injunctions are named after the seminal New York State Court of Appeals case -- First Nat. Stores v. Yellowstone Shopping Ctr. (21 NY2d630) -- which created them. In that particular commercial lease dispute, the state's highest court concluded that once the tenancy was terminated, there was nothing that could be done to revive the arrangement. It was in that case that the court suggested that the tenant could have avoided a forfeiture of its lease had it secured an injunction from the court "stopping time" -- tolling the running of that curative period -- prior to the expiration date delineated in that default notice.
For more on these special injunctions, please use this link: Yellowstones