Cracks in foundation leave residents of an East Harlem building hanging
By Chine Labbe November 25, 2009
Credit: Chine Labbe
Rose Sylvester, 48, says she fears for her life. For the past year, she has been watching the vertical cracks running from the basement to the roof of her apartment’s building, fearful that it would collapse.
“I’m letting the building speak for itself,” she said, while offering a guided tour of her home, at 8 East 110th Street, off Fifth Avenue, in East Harlem. “Just look.”
The five-story building, with 60 residential units, was built in 1910 and was renovated in the late 1980s. Now, one giant crack divides the building. The crack is visible on the walls, on the floor, and on the ceiling. “It’s the same story on each floor,” Sylvester said.
The first big crack appeared in August 2008. Since then, multiple other cracks have appeared. Relentlessly, Sylvester tried to document them. On the fourth floor, above a doorframe, pencil writing reads “new crack, first noticed Aug 5th.” Further down the corridor, another reads “02/05/09.” “I tell people, if you see something, note the date,” Sylvester said.
The building started shifting two years ago, when construction work began next door, at 1280 Fifth Avenue. There, the Museum for African Art and its two development partners, Brickman and Sidney Fetner Associates, started their joint project: building the permanent home for the Museum and a 20-story tower, with 102 luxury residences.
“We’ve been repeatedly told that it was OK, that it was going to shift,” Sylvester said. “In the basement, they’ve put monitors to measure the shifting. But we don’t know what they mean.” Like her, several other tenants said they felt insecure. The cracked section of the building is the only exit of the building other than the fire escape, they explained.
Some tenants, like Sylvester, began to spend as much time as possible outside of the building. “I come and go, I’m too anxious here,” she said. Others decided to stay, despite the fear. “I’m trying to (live) with it,” said one middle-aged resident who asked to remain anonymous because she feared retribution from her landlord. Yet, she took some precautions. She put all her important documents; her passport, her birth certificate, her lease, etc., in a backpack, and left it in a friend’s apartment.
“Before, we lived in comfort, now we live in fear,” Sylvester said. The low-income residential building, managed by Hope Community, a community based-organization, never had major building violations in the past.
“This was my first apartment,” said the woman who requested anonymity. As do most of the tenants, she loves the building. “In the neighborhood, they pay more rent and their apartments are tiny,” she said while showing her two bedroom apartment. “What we have here is a blessing.”
Robert Paulin, 52, pays $865 a month for a three-bedroom apartment. “You tell me of any place next to Central Park where people pay less than market rate!” he said. “Ain’t no three bedrooms for that price anywhere else.”
Yet, the construction next door changed the tenants’ perception of their building. First, there was the shaking. Then, the building slowly started to shift, tenants recalled. “For years, my door was very crooked, but when the building shifted, it straightened out,” Sylvester said. “That’s the irony of it.”
Credit: Chine Labbe
On Feb. 26, 2008, firemen evacuated the building, because of the shifting. “It was Super Bowl Sunday,” Shirelle Perez, 42, recalled. “I was evacuated because my door couldn’t lock anymore.” The shifting also hurt the elevator, making it off balance by an inch or two. It would not stop at the level of the floors. Hope Community repaired it this summer.
With the shifting and the cracks came the rodents, residents said. “Big rats were coming through the wall,” Sylvester said. “You could hear them running at night.” The rat infestation was contained with poison, but that created another problem. The rats died between the walls, creating a stench that bothered numerous residents. It was so strong that Sylvester said she ended up in the emergency room. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I stayed at the hospital for observation the whole summer.”
Jay Marcus, executive director of Hope Community, acknowledged in a phone interview that in June, when he inspected the building, “the odor was horrendous.” He said Hope Community addressed the issue this summer, and added that a set of external cracks pre-dating the construction work had been repaired.
The interior cracks though, are yet to be repaired. “Everybody knows about them, but no one is doing anything,” Sylvester said. “I feel abandoned.” Marcus said in a phone interview that the organization was addressing the issue. He said Hope hired engineers at the cost of the construction company to complete biweekly reports to monitor the cracks. He added that the organization had hired another engineer to prepare a survey of the work needed. “We are very eager to get this report and start repairing these cracks,” he said, anticipating that the work could begin in mid-December. “I can assure everyone that the building is safe,” he added. “That is definitely a priority for us. If there was any sign whatsoever that the building was unsafe, we would immediately deal with that.”
Still, many tenants said they felt insecure, and expressed their wish to be temporarily relocated in one of Hope’s 73 buildings in East Harlem until the end of the construction work. “I feel very unsafe,” Millie Cintron, 30, said. And she concluded, bitterly: “This is the price to pay for being poor.”
