What a world: In your youth you risk your life fighting overseas for Uncle Sam, and when you finally reach retirement age, you have to spend your days fighting for the right to socialize in the lobby of your condo. After a bitter court battle, five elderly members of the Greatest Generation have won the right to congregate in the lobby of a condo in New Springville, Staten Island. They're only permitted to meet there for ninety minutes at a time, on just two days per week, but that's better than the alternative proposed by the condo board, which sought to banish the men completely. The trouble all started, according to the Advance, when the New Springville Five reprimanded a condo board member for extinguishing her cigarette butts on the building floor. Then things went all Del Boca Vista.
Although the men had been gathering in the lobby of the Elmwood Park II daily for over a decade, they were informed that their daily klatch violated the condo's rules against loitering. "We used to sit out there, talk to people, talk amongst ourselves," Leroy Tepper, 81, tells Habitat Magazine. "Other than me, three or four of them had been sitting out there for years and no one complained." But in February 2009, Tepper supposedly told board member Joann Goldstein, "Congratulations for putting your cigarette out in the planter!" Tepper says Goldstein then went on a "vendetta" and and her husband, a former cop, came down the next day and threatened Tepper, yelling, "I'll kick the living shit out of you! I wish you were 15 years younger!"
The men were subsequently fined $25 for refusing to disperse, and they retained a lawyer to fight the condo in court. One board member said that the men were known to "make comments about all the women's legs and backsides... A bunch of women go through the garage to avoid these men." But the New Springville Five strenuously deny this, and Tom Milazzo, 79, a Korean War vet who gets around with the aid of a walker, asks the Post, "This is what we fought in the war for?" On November 30th, a judge worked out a compromise between the warring factions, and at Tepper seems happy with the decision, telling Habitat, "The basic reason is because of longevity—how long the boys were meeting there—and that we had never been fined before and now all of a sudden we are." But it must be a bittersweet victory for Tepper, because the controversy has surely ruined any shot of running for president of the condo board.
