Little Heyward is now two weeks old and he has yet to experience the comfort and warmth that every newborn baby should have. Instead, he has been living in a building in the Bronx that is cited for 126 housing violations, a building without heat or hot water.
Yesterday, Zellina Rodgers, his mother, filed a claim stating that since the day before last August’s blackout, there has been no electricity in her apartment (4E). Rodgers is forced to bring electricity into her home via a system of cables from a neighboring apartment. The apartment feels like it has been ravaged by a bomb.
“The owner hasn’t come to fix the electric problem since August. Finally, [yesterday] he sent someone to take care of it, because he found out that the press was coming,” explained the tenant. Rodgers usually boils water all day just to keep her apartment warm.
The entire building has had no heat or hot water since last Saturday, when tenant Luz Ortiz, in apartment 1E, had to call the fire department at 6 a.m. after realizing that her apartment was filling up with smoke. Ortiz’s 18 and 22 year-old daughters suffer from asthma.
“The fire department came and put out the fire that had started in the boiler. We tried to go back to bed afterwards, but we couldn’t. I went to work at 9 a.m., and when I got back, the apartment was thick with smoke again. I called the fire department once again. They explained that the boiler needs to be cleaned, otherwise, the cold could be dangerous,” commented Ortiz. She added five days have gone by, and they still don’t have heat or hot water.
According to Ortiz, the owners of the building promised to install an emergency boiler so that the building would have heat, but they “haven’t done anything.” She added, “I called HPD and when HPD showed up to resolve the problem, the super didn’t want to open [the door to the boiler room] for them, claiming that a company was already coming to fix it.”
Due to the cold temperatures in their apartment, Ortiz’s daughters, Cynthia and Reyna, have to treat their asthma with a special machine three times each day. Unfortunately, the problems with Ortiz’s apartment don’t stop there. Her bathroom is totally dismantled: it has no sink and the plumbing is faulty.
Ortiz filed a complaint against the building’s owner in New York City Housing Court. She is scheduled to appear on Dec. 22, 2003.
The building, at 1052 Boynton Avenue in the Bronx—registered with HPD under the number 51009—belongs to the WDJ Realty Corporation, which is headed by Nicole Pignone. The building has four floors with 20 apartments. Its residents are primarily Latinos and African Americans.
Among the problems we noticed during our visit was that the building had no mailboxes, according to tenants, for the past three years. The building’s entrance also has no security lock.
Yesterday, we spoke with Nicole Pignone. She assured us that with respect to the building’s lack of heat, caused by factors “outside of our control.“ Pignone promised that the boiler would be repaired within a couple of days. As for the lock on the building’s front door, she said, “Each time that we install one, the tenants break it.”
She denied that the building didn’t have mailboxes, although we told her that during our visit we only saw the frame in which mailboxes could probably be installed.
With respect to the electric problem in 4E, Pignone insisted that the tenant “doesn’t allow us to repair the problem. Each time we send someone over, she says that she’s thinking about moving.” When we spoke to Rodgers about Pignone’s claim, she stated, “She is lying. Nobody’s ever come to fix the problem until today. But yes, I told her that if she didn’t take care of the problem I was going to move to a new apartment.”
Jennifer Araujo lives in apartment 2C. Due to the low temperatures in her apartment, her children aged five, three, two and six months old have the flu and fevers. Araujo spends her days giving them medicine.
“And all of this because of a negligent landlord. The way they treat us is unjust. You can’t even walk into my bedroom. It’s freezing in there. I have to have a space heater on, water boiling, and spend the night making sure that nothing catches on fire, just to keep my kids warm,” indicated Araujo.
Antonia Hernández, who lives in apartment 1C with her one-year-old son, has to keep a space heater permanently on just to keep her home warm.
HPD spokesperson Marylin Peguero said that agency inspectors visited the building and discovered Class C violations, including a lack of heat, and that the owner would be called to rectify the problem in the next 24 hours.
