PUBLISHED BY MOSHOLU PRESERVATION CORPORATION

Tracey Tenants Tired of Elevator Ups and Downs

By HEATHER HADDON

For years, Tracey Towers tenants have said silent prayers before boarding their elevators, hoping they didn’t end up getting stuck between floors or surging way beyond their desired destination only to plunge right back down to the lobby.

These dangers came into painfully sharp focus earlier this month when Ming Kuang Chen, a Chinese restaurant delivery man, got stuck in one of the elevators for almost four days. No Tracey tenant had an experience to match that, but almost everyone in the building has an elevator tale to tell.

“My wife was stuck in one for three hours about a year ago,” said Leon Ade Hawkins, a longtime Tracey resident. “I just take my chances. Any of the elevators can stop.”

Betty Woodard, 61, had a similar take. “I’ve always been concerned,” said Woodard, who has lived in the Mosholu Parkway complex for 30 years. While her apartment is beautiful, its location on the top floor of the 41-story building frightens her. “I often wonder how someone would get up to me if I ever had a medical emergency,” she said.

Long overdue work

R-Y Management, which oversees the buildings, contends that it is too cash poor to make the repairs, leading the city Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD) last year to approve a 29 percent rent hike over three years. HPD has oversight over Tracey as a Mitchell-Lama, a government program that subsidizes middle-income housing.

Work to replace the first elevator began this month and will be completed soon, according to a Tracey maintenance supervisor. The other 11 will be renovated two at a time until they are finished in about a year. “All of them are being modernized,” said Don Miller, an R-Y spokesman. “It was in the works before the incident a few weeks ago.”

While questions remain as to why Chen wasn’t found sooner (see cover story), Tracey’s elevators have a disturbing paper trail. Of the 41 complaints listed by Department of Buildings (DOB) records for Tracey, over half are for the elevators. They include three elevators being out at once, an elevator busted all week, and one person trapped for 45 minutes.

It’s difficult to know which elevators are functioning as the hallway floor indicators are broken on many floors.

DOB lists complaints for most of Tracey’s 12 elevators, which are divided between Tower B, where Chen was trapped, and Tower A. The elevators all shake and behave unpredictably.

“They break, skip floors, stop in the middle of floors,” said James Stokes, a 15-year resident. “We’ve been complaining for the past 12 years, and management has done nothing.”

Elevator inspections

While the complaints do go back that far, many of them were dismissed by city officials. An inspector investigated a complaint on two of the elevators, including the one Chen was trapped in, just two days before he went missing. Jennifer Garvin, a DOB spokesperson, said the inspector checked if the elevators stopped on each floor, and if their alarms and intercoms functioned.

“We observed [the elevators] for ourselves, and they seemed to work fine,” she said. “The inspectors know this stuff inside and out.”

The certificates located in the elevators stated they were last inspected in 2002, but Garvin said that the papers must not have been updated. “[Maintenance] is required to keep up with that,” she said.

Tenants have repeatedly said management neglects the elevators, and the Norwood News has reported on the problems as far back as 2000. “They’ve tried rehabbing them, but you can’t put a Band-Aid on an elephant,” said Gerry Powell, who has lived at Tracey over 20 years. The elevators have not been replaced since the towers were built in 1972, but Garvin says age wouldn’t be a problem — with proper upkeep. DOB has issued 17 violations to R-Y since 2002 for failing to maintain the elevators.

R-Y, which is a subsidiary of the company that owns Tracey, has even more serious elevator problems in River Park Towers, a 391-unit Mitchell-Lama in Morris Heights. Of 150 DOB violations, 80 percent of them are for the elevators. A boy died at the complex in 2002 after falling down an elevator shaft.

Blame game

Tenants and R-Y have engaged in a decade-long blame game as to who is responsible for the elevators and the other problems in the building. Before 2004, R-Y last raised the rents in 1987, and tried to again in 1990. Tenants successfully sued R-Y twice to stop the rent hikes until R-Y fixed the C violations, the most egregious type.

But HPD thinks the tenants effectively shot themselves in the foot, as they believe R-Y couldn’t fix the elevators and violations until they received more rent. “When a Mitchell-Lama does not have sufficient rent revenue, it can not properly maintain its day-to-day operations or do long-term capital improvements,” said Gary Sloman, a director of operations at HPD.

Robert Vaccarello, R-Y’s vice president, said something similar in 2003. “For most of the time, the building was holding its own on the budget, but in the past four years, it’s really been put behind the eight ball,” Vaccarello told the Norwood News at the time.

Sloman said that repairs have picked up since the rent increase, and the building is getting inspected more frequently. “We are handling [inspections] in a better fashion,” he said.

While tenants have also seen improvements, many feel that they are at the low end of the R-Y corporate totem pole. R-Y oversees 34 buildings, including luxury Manhattan high-rises. HPD records list 174 violations for Tracey, which is pretty good for a building of its size. But Ruppert Towers, a Manhattan Mitchell-Lama managed by R-Y, only has four violations.

Some tenants wonder if they get short shrift because many of their neighbors aren’t active complainers. “There are old-timers like me who are willing to criticize, but the new arrivals are not,” Woodard said.

Tenant complaints

Woodard says she’s tried to get other tenants to complain, but many, especially those who are recent immigrants, won’t. Sam Gillian, a 26-year resident, who withheld his rent over the winter for a lack of heat and hot water and won a rent abatement in court, tries to convince his neighbors to take similar action. But he finds few takers.

New signs in Tracey’s lobby from a newly invigorated tenants’ council encourage residents to complain about building problems.

But the complaint process could be hampered by a technicality. HPD lists the building by the address 3299 Jerome Ave., so if a tenant registered their complaint under 20 or 40 West Mosholu Parkway, which is the towers’ postal address, it might not get logged. Sloman wasn’t aware of the issue.

While tenants are relieved that Chen was found unharmed — some said they prayed for him during the hunt — many resent that it took such a dramatic incident to generate so much attention to the building’s problems.

“If one of us tenants got stuck, we might not have heard so much about it,” Gillian said.

Jordan Moss contributed to this story.

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