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Fighting to Keep Her Home In One Piece BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC Mold. Flooded basement. Leaks so persistent mushrooms sprouted. Rodents. No heat, hot water, or cooking gas. And this: “I almost had the building demolished with me in it.” This is a partial list of the burdens longtime tenant Cathy Levan has faced in her apartment since the building’s ownership changed hands two years ago. It was not always so. When Levan, 54, moved to 940 First Ave. in July 1998, it was a family-owned building with longtime tenants. The four-story mixed-use building between E. 51st and 52nd Sts. was built in 1900, according to StreetEasy.com. “It’s got a vibrant business downstairs,” Levan told Manhattan Express at her apartment on July 27. Pisacane Seafood was a well-loved fish shop owned by Joseph Enea, and run with his sons, Paul and Frank, Levan recalled. Enea owned the building as well, using the units right above the shop for his office, she said. There were four units above that, two on each floor. Enea was “a very good landlord” and “everything was amicable,” Levan said. After Enea died, Pisacane Seafood closed its doors in May 2015, according to Levan and news reports. In the leadup to the business closing and the sons selling the building, Levan said, “they started telling all the tenants to leave.” The tenants spoke with four different lawyers and “they all thought we had cases to stay.” But two of the units took a buyout from the Eneas, according to Levan. Levan and her partner, who declined to be interviewed, decided to stay. “The rent-controlled tenant… below me was staying so I just figured if he’s rent-controlled and we’re filing to find out what we are, it should be fine,” she said. In July 2015, the building was sold for $6.85 million to First Avenue Realty Holdings LP, city property records show.
Photo by Dusica Sue Malesevic
Cathy Levan is fighting to stand in the way of her landlord’s aim to demolish her home.
Levan said the new owner, Cheskel Strulovitch, never introduced himself and she engaged the law firm of David Rozenholc, whom Crain’s New York dubbed “the most feared tenant attorney” in an October 2015 article. Once the property changed hands, trash collection halted and things in the building started to deteriorate, Levan said. Even while two units remained occupied, permits were filed with the city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) for a 14-story, 13-unit, mixed-use building that would rise to 141 feet at the site, 6sqft and others reported in September 2015. The final other tenant, who did not respond to interview requests, left in
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February 2016. For a time, windows in the apartment below Levan’s had no glass, making the unit “pigeon central,” she said. (The windows have recently been fixed.) “That was just the beginning,” she said. With heat cut off, pipes in the building froze and then exploded, Levan recalling, “the basement was probably four feet under water. Not to mention, you know, there was water leaking in every apartment below me.” Levan waited seven days to have water restored to her apartment. Finally this past February, she did hear from Strulovitch via an eviction notice posted on her door. Levan said
she had earlier taken the landlord to Housing Court, in November 2015, for “a long list of things” — some were fixed; others not, including “a super mold problem… that they just covered over with new drywall and some insulation without any remediation of the mold. That’s very significant to me because of my health condition. I am a cancer survivor and [have] autoimmune diseases” that are triggered by environmental toxins. Interior demolition in the vacant units, meanwhile, meant “debris was all over and pieces of the ceiling were falling down,” she said. “We just made do with what we could, the whole 2016, after that major event of the flooding,” Levan said. “And the mold was continuing to grow. It started leaking through the [third floor unit’s] door and spreading like a pool of water into the hallway and there were mushrooms growing … coming out from underneath the door.” By January of this year, water leaks were getting really bad and workers were ripping up the linoleum in the hallway. “They came in with sanders and just filled the whole building with sawdust, and there were two or three inches of sawdust on all the halls and all the stairs,” Levan said. A camera was also installed outside of her apartment, facing her door. “It’s definitely abysmal,” Levan said. “It’s not a nice way to live. But it is that way. It’s been that way for so long, I don’t even remember what it feels like not to be living like this.” On March 30, Strulovitch filed a PW1 form for full demolition of the building, stipulating that it was unoccupied, according to the DOB’s website. Tenant advocates and elected officials have long complained that PW1s often make such false claims, as part of a strategy of construction harassment of holdout tenants. According to Andrew Rudansky, a MOLD continued on p. 4
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