The heat and hot water went out at 709 West 170th Street on Thanksgiving morning.
“It happens all the time,” tenant Loyda Irizarry told Hell Gate two days later, as she led a reporter down into the alley next to the Washington Heights building. A neighbor climbed onto the rack of garbage cans and leaned over to open the padlock at the top of the door to the boiler room. Inside, there’s a red gauge on the wall with a tiny bit of liquid at the bottom of its tube, indicating that the oil tank is empty, with a black mark drawn a few inches up.
“We have a 2,000-gallon tank, and they only put in 300,” Irizarry said, explaining the mark.
Irizarry is a retired teacher who has lived in the building since 1984. Last February, she said, the heat went out while she was recovering from chemotherapy, so she called the landlord’s tenant-relations manager.
“You know what she said to me? ‘Get a space heater,'” Irizarry said. “I was sick, and it was so cold. I said, ‘The boiler’s not broken. You don’t want to put oil in.'”
Downtown at 331 East 14th Street, another building owned by the same landlord, many of the windows are boarded up. The tenants paid for a new front door lock themselves to keep out people who were sleeping in the halls and leaving needles and feces in the vacant apartments and storefront, according to resident Jillian Heft.
“There was a point where us tenants were outnumbered by intruders,” Heft said.
Meanwhile, she found mushrooms growing on her bathroom floor, watered by a leak upstairs. When the heat and hot water went out recently, she added, the new maintenance man didn’t know the code for the padlock to the boiler room.
“They had a maintenance team, and they fired everybody during COVID,” said Peter Griffin, who’s lived in the building since 1979.