Passing in front of 618 Academy Street, a building in upper Manhattan, a woman can be seen bathing next to her children on the fire escape. Don't be surprised. The woman, Reyna Mercado, is a tenant in the building. She has opted for this peculiar method of hygiene because her landlord hasn't wanted her to repair the bathtub, which has been unusable for some months.

"I live in such subhuman conditions that I have had to bathe on the fire escape with my children because the bathtub is covered up," said Mercado, who carried a sign with the address of her building, as she protested, along with dozens of other tenants from Washington Heights, Inwood and Hamilton Heights, against Perseus Management/Cronus Capital, the landlord – an independent property management firm –which they accuse of "abuse and neglect." 

Six-eighteen Academy Street has 78 housing code violations, 37 of them Class C, which means that they need emergency repairs, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). 

Diógenes Abreu, of the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation (NMIC), says Perseus owns 30 buildings in upper Manhattan, each with between 20 and 25 apartments, and that despite the tenants condemning the landlord's negligence on multiple occasions, "the landlord hasn't done a thing to correct the thousands of violations on their properties."

[pic]Fany Hernández, president of the Unión Communal of Washington Heights and Inwood, a tenants' union, has lived for 20 years at 551 West 170th Street, a building owned by Perseus that has 231 violations, 59 of them Class C. She said that the purpose of the protest was to get the landlord to make repairs, and to end the harassment.

But according to Vilma Vigil, a property manager for Perseus Management/Cronus Capital, the protest "was unjustified" and declared that with regards to the violations registered at HPD, the company "is making those repairs. We have a maintenance team that is making all the repairs."