For several years, tenants at Manhattan House, the huge landmark white brick apartment complex at 200 East 66th Street, have complained bitterly about noisy construction, dust, debris and environmental hazards as many of the 581 apartments in five connected towers were renovated and converted to condominiums.
In the last few weeks, even as dozens of new owners closed on apartments, tenants have been considering whether to go to court again about damage they say was deliberately done by sponsors to drive tenants out.
But perhaps there is room in this tough Manhattan street brawl for a kinder, gentler approach. Property records filed last week show that in early November, Jeffrey Hollender, a businessman who travels the country lecturing business leaders on corporate responsibility and cooperation, and his wife, Sheila Hollender, paid $2.2 million for a 12th-floor two-bedroom apartment at Manhattan House.
Mr. Hollender, a native New Yorker, moved to Vermont where he developed a business, Seventh Generation, a company that describes itself as selling “authentic, safe, and environmentally responsible products for a healthy home.” The company, of which he is the president and “chief inspired protagonist,” did about $100 million in sales last year.
What matters most in business, Mr. Hollender says, is not growth, quarterly profits and shareholder value, but good corporate citizenship.
“We must ensure that the practice of corporate responsibility is spread to every sector of society,” Mr. Hollender said in a statement a few weeks ago. “Now is not the time to retreat in fear, but forge ahead to create a better and brighter world for all.”
Rafael Urquia II, a lawyer who has led a Manhattan House tenant group through several bumpy years, said of his neighbor-to-be, “There’s some irony in that.”
Mr. Hollender had speaking engagements on the West Coast last week and did not respond to several requests for comment.
Adam Leitman Bailey, a lawyer for the tenants’ group, would not comment on the conflict.
Dolly Lenz, the broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman who heads the sales effort at Manhattan House, said that the developers had been acting responsibly in carrying out the conversion.
She said she didn’t think the complaints were “anything at all unusual.” “It is the tenant-owner thing that always happens in a conversion,” she said.
By Josh Barbanel, Big Deal, New York Times
November 23, 2008
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To the New York Times, Dolly Lenz and Jeffrey Hollender: For the last 3 years, since October, 2005, Manhattan House has subjected resident tenants, many of whom are elderly, to a lack of heat in the fall and winter months (check the HPD, DOB website and records), repeated leaks and flooding in tenants' apartments with a concomittant refusal to pay for damages caused to tenants' belongings, repeated water shut-offs, and short-notice demands that tenants remove themselves and their belongings from their apartments for pipe repair and attendant asbestos abatement made necessary only as a result of the interior jackhammering and construction performed during the renovation of overhead or adjacent apartments for sale. Such practices and conditions do NOT constitute a standard "tenant-owner thing that always happens in a conversion" as stated by Ms. Lenz, and does not evince the "greater corporate responsibility" envisioned by Mr. Hollender. Instead, this is a display of corporate greed in its most base form; i.e., a disregard for the health, safety and welfare of human beings and the law in pursuit of the almighty real estate dollar. Perhaps Mr. Hollender would like to return from his second (or third or fourth) home in Vermont, and Ms. Lenz would like to move from her apartment elsewhere to live in the building full-time under these conditions for the next 3 years? The resident tenants in the building would appreciate any efforts made by Mr. Hollender toward a "better and brighter world for all" in this building, and we would all love to hear Ms. Lenz' comments after just one weekend without heat and/or hot water in the winter. From, A Tenant at Manhattan House
Judges in landlord/tenant proceedings have sentenced landlords to reside in their slum dwellings.
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