notice to quit is provided. The specific agreement in this lease required the tenant to give the
landlord a [*3]month's notice that he intended to leave at the end
of the lease and that "[f]ailure to timely notify the landlord that the tenant will vacate the
property shall make this lease a month-to-month lease and the tenant shall be liable for an
additional 30 days rent." [FN6] Both parties were adults when the lease was
signed and they must be presumed to have read the lease completely and agreed to be bound by
its terms. Since the court has already found that the earliest the tenant provided the landlord with
a firm move-out date was October 9th, resolution of this case involves the validity of that
paragraph since parties cannot contract or act in contravention of established New York law.
Lease extension provisions derive from English real property law and have been in existence
in our state since the time of the revolutionary war.[FN7] By 1915, however, the Court of Appeals noted
that while they are enforceable, "[c]ovenants by a landlord for continual renewals are not favored
for they tend to create a perpetuity."[FN8] Two decades later, New York restricted the use
of such clauses in leases when it required the landlord to provide a tenant with written notice of
an imminent automatic renewal in order for such a provision to be valid.[FN9] Under our law,
[n]o provision of a lease of any real property or premises which states that the term
thereof shall be deemed renewed for a specified additional period of time unless the tenant gives
notice to the lessor of his intention to quit the premises at the expiration of such term shall be
operative unless the lessor, at least fifteen days and not more than thirty days previous to the