Governor Cuomo Says Cynthia Nixon Saved a Teahouse. Huh?

The debate on Wednesday between Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his primary challenger Cynthia Nixon contained several moments of drama.

Ms. Nixon called Mr. Cuomo “corrupt” and hammered him over his handling of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which she said he used “like an A.T.M.”

Mr. Cuomo implored her to stop interrupting him. “I let you speak,” he said.

Ms. Nixon also repeatedly painted Mr. Cuomo as the tool of big-money donors. Mr. Cuomo responded by mentioning a series of requests Ms. Nixon made to friends at City Hall. Just look, he said, at “the teahouse for Sarah Jessica Parker.”

This wound up being one of the evening’s more confounding moments.

[Read more about Wednesday’s debate.]

Ms. Nixon looked bewildered.

“I don’t even know what you’re referring to,” she said.

“Well, you should read the newspapers,” Mr. Cuomo said.

The episode in question apparently involved Tea & Sympathy, a West Village institution that opened on Greenwich Avenue in 1991.

Ms. Parker, who was Ms. Nixon’s co-star on “Sex and the City” and is now supporting her run for governor, did try to help save the restaurant at one point, but only because she has been getting food there for more than 20 years.

“I don’t have a teahouse,” Ms. Parker said in an interview. “I don’t have money invested.”

The owner is Nicky Perry, an expatriate from London who arrived in New York in the early 1980s at the age of 21 and spent several years waitressing at the Union Square Cafe and Café Central.

One night she was out with a friend who complained about how few places there were to go for an old-fashioned cup of tea.

Tea & Sympathy was designed to fill that gap. It had food, too — creamy scones, thick bacon and shepherd’s pie. (The New York Times gave it a rave review.)

Around 1995, Ms. Perry opened Carry On Tea & Sympathy, a grocery store and takeout place next door that stocked biscuits, beans and British candy. In 2000, Ms. Perry opened A Salt and Battery, a shop that offered fish and chips.

“We went from strength to strength,” Ms. Perry said. “But I’ve had to ask for a lot of help over the years.”

Tea & Sympathy’s neighbors during the early years included the coffee shop the Village Den; a Caribbean restaurant, Day-O; and Mxyplyzyk, an affordable gift and home furnishings store filled with quirky objects that seemed to come straight from a John Waters movie.

All those establishments are now closed, the result of what Ms. Perry described in an interview as rising real estate costs and decreased foot traffic after the closure of St. Vincent’s Hospital in 2011.

In 2014, the owner of 110-112 Greenwich Avenue sold the building that houses A Salt and Battery and Carry on Tea & Sympathy. Ms. Perry was panicked about her rent going up and mentioned it to Ms. Parker.

So Ms. Parker sent an email to Ms. Nixon, who had raised funds and donated to Bill de Blasio during his mayoral runs. In the email, Ms. Parker — a subway rider and avid reader of the –WestView News, a West Village neighborhood newspaper — described how small-business owners in the neighborhood were being squeezed out by rising rents and onerous fines from the city.

They also did not seem to be getting much help from the de Blasio administration, Ms. Parker said, even though their plight was related, as she put it, to “the very things” he spent his campaign “criticizing Bloomberg for,” a reference to former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Ms. Nixon forwarded that email to a few people at City Hall, although Ms. Perry said that she and her landlord ultimately worked out their dispute without any intervention from the city.

In fact, she had largely forgotten about Ms. Parker’s email until Thursday, when a reporter called to say that the episode had been weaponized in the debate. Ms. Perry was bewildered that Mr. Cuomo brought it up as evidence of influence peddling. “When I told my husband,” she said, “he nearly had a car crash.”

Ms. Parker also was surprised to be a focal point of the debate, which she heard about the following morning while listening to “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC. What bothered her was not that she came in for criticism but that Mr. Cuomo seemed to be “making light of a small-business owner who had been a member of our community for 20 years” and deserved “to be heard.”

“My thinking was that politicians typically like to support local businesses,” she said.

Ms. Perry described years of barely keeping her head above water. Since 1991, Tea & Sympathy’s rent has gone from around $800 a month to over $5,000, she said. Raising prices on food and drink to keep pace with those increases would quickly drive her out of business, she said: “I can’t charge $30 for a pot of tea.”

Ms. Perry said the combined income for all three businesses was “under $100,000”; just enough for her and her husband, Sean Kavanagh-Dowsett, “to pay our bloody bills.”

Ms. Perry and Mr. Kavanagh-Dowsett’s 14-year-old daughter attends the Clinton School in Gramercy Park, because it’s free. “We are not 1 percenters,” Ms. Perry said. “We’re holding on for dear life.”

As she saw it, Ms. Parker and Ms. Nixon merely did “what decent people do,” which was to try to help someone with less power and wealth than themselves.

Ms. Perry also plans on voting for Ms. Nixon next week. “I don’t dislike Cuomo,” Ms. Perry said. “I don’t think he’s done a terrible job.” But, she thinks, he represents more of the same.

Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, said: “Governor Cuomo has done more for small businesses than any governor in N.Y. history.” She added, “He was making the point that Cynthia Nixon, a large donor to Mayor de Blasio, used her special access — access that average New Yorkers do not have — to call in favors for her wealthy friends.”

Ms. Perry doesn’t like that Mr. Cuomo has taken millions of dollars from big real estate developers, the sort who threaten her existence. “Everyone’s existence,” she said. “We need someone with empathy. That is what’s lacking.”