Tenants Win Free Rent in Squalid Washington Heights Building

Tenants enduring abysmal conditions in their Washington Heights apartment building have been granted a one year rent reprieve in a settlement with their landlord, a deal orchestrated with help from the Community Legal Resource Network. Now if they could just get the landlord, Carmine Alessandro, to make the long-overdue repairs; after nearly a month since the settlement, Alessandro has yet to start the agreed-upon work. And there's a lot to be done: The six-story rat-infested building's elevator has been broken on and off for five years, residents have been without heat and hot water for most of the past year, and 77-year-old Julia Sepulveda has a 3-foot-wide hole in her ceiling that exposes her bathroom to her upstairs neighbor's apartment. "Whenever I shower, I have to do it under an umbrella," she tells the News. As for the elevator, which the Department of Buildings deems one of the worst in the city, Alessandro blames the tenants: "We fix the elevator frequently and they keep breaking it."

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By John Del Signore in News on March 23, 2009 1:10 PM

Comments [rss]

Dude69

What's up with the picture? I don't think readers born after 1985 would get it.

Felix Hoenikker

If those descriptions are correct, then that building should be condemned and razed, not repaired.

pazzia

the court should garnish his wages (or whatever the equivalent is) and appoint a third-party guardian to use the money for repairs.

whitecastlerock

Alessandro sounds a lot like Vincent Gardenia (aka Big Lou Kritski) in The Super

YELLOWFOOT

Why do landlords always think that tenants "break things" like people don't have anything better to do then to go around breaking things like we do it on purpose

fugothamist

this s why RS/RC is a flawed system

virgilstarkwell

sidenote: anyone ever notice how every paragraph in a daily news article is usually just one sentence long? me thinks they don't have a whole lot of respect for the intelligence of their readers.

virgilstarkwell

"We fix the elevator frequently and they keep breaking it."

those damn tenants. if they just took the stairs, the elevator wouldn't keep breaking all the time. lazy, rent-stabilized bastards.