Pity the New York Landlord
Tucker, William
right into the ceremony. It was a jimdandy, complete with what I took to be a grail, an ornate ceremonial dagger, and a phallic ritualistic instrument periodically elevated above the gathering in...
...This 'Simon and Schuster, $17.95 guy is a rat . . . a wheeler-dealer and conniver who owned half the buildings for miles, though he acted as if he were poverty-stricken, obliged to live in the basement and feed himself off cans of ravioli and peanut butter...
...And I've been to so many Motown revival weddings that I no longer find Marvin gay or The Miracles such a temptation...
...Care to join me...
...Most of the apartments were rent-controlled...
...The housing court judge looked the case over and decided to overturn the eviction...
...You can't evict anyone in New York City...
...Everything my tenants know about dodging rent and beating eviction they learned from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development...
...Fixed up it's probably worth half-a-million...
...The government has offered me the chance to take back my family's old hotel," she said...
...At his sentencing, Gelman objected, saying he was "a quiet man" who had been victimized by "tenants who did not pay rent for two years...
...I may do it...
...The building is part of the "loft district," an old industrial sector that oncehoused hundreds of small factories, including the nation's first electrical industry...
...The Operator Eleanor Vail was a real-estate dealer for two years before she decided to become a landlord...
...Rather than let the parties work things out themselves, the city government set up the Loft Board, a new regulatory agency that—once again—has resolved most disputes by ruling in favor of the tenant...
...The Immigrant Brian Jevmerov left Yugoslavia when he was fourteen...
...When Gelman tried to raise rents, tenants called in the housing inspectors, had violations placed on the building, and stopped paying rent altogether...
...The tenants went to housing court, charging she had altered the structure of the building without a permit...
...The third-floor artist immediately went to the Loft Board for protection...
...The Heir Paul Goedig grew up in a four-story brownstone owned by his parents, right across the street from Mt...
...Sassy future IRS auditor that he was, Rob lifted his right hand in the satanic gesture and murmured, "Hook 'em, Horns—Texas Number One...
...Jesus, his apartment was even worse, if such a thing was possible, than my own...
...In 1985, one of Rubin's tenants moved elsewhere and quit paying rent, but didn't want to give up the loft...
...Joel Steinberg, a 46-year-old disbarred criminal lawyer, is currently on trial for beating to death his adopted daughter, Lisa...
...He had been sleeping onfriends' couches for two years, lost touch with his career, and—although nothing much was said—seemed to have watched his marriage fail as well...
...A family living illegally in a store on the first floor was feuding with a second-floor welfare family with ten children...
...I admit I was bored in New Jersey," she said...
...Goedig changed tactics...
...In 1985, she bought a problem-plagued, five-story building on the Lower East Side...
...It was a challenge...
...Steinberg's landlords were Jaroslaw Leshko and his wife, both elderly Rumanian immigrants who bought the building fifteen years ago...
...The room had a rank smell...
...There won't be any breast of chicken, flying rice, dueling accordions, or poorly tossed garters, but there probably won't be anybody named Uncle Jerry or Aunt Mildred either...
...Jevmerov had two such artist-tenants in his building...
...The judge told Rubin the law demanded the heat be turned on at six a.m...
...No one else would buy the building because of the problem with the tenants...
...It was true, she said...
...He lived with two large vicious dogs...
...Eventually, whole blocks, characterized by distinctive cast-iron facades, stood vacant...
...Taylor said, she would be forced to give up the apartment...
...He borrowed another $3,000 and slept every night in the cold, darkened kitchen protecting the pipes...
...It was a miserably cold day...
...The second-floor kids have broken the toilet several times and are deliberately flooding the downstairs," she said...
...What drives people crazy, though, is that once all the rent-controlled bargains are gone, even reasonable housing becomes impossible to find...
...Well, I'm just trying to do an objective story about why New York housing is so crazy...
...So if you happen to be in the marryin' mood this year, I suggest contacting your local warlock or witch and seeing whether you can't schedule a satanic wedding...
...It was ghoulish...
...He gave me a wry little smile...
...But with residences now legal, landlords could offer leases, renovate buildings themselves—and charge much higher rents...
...They called the building department and soon the inspectors were combing every nook and cranny, hunting for violations...
...He never actually said he wasn't going to pay the lent," said Fresco...
...I'm not interested in the kind of objective, journalistic story you're doing...
...Jevmerov set up his workshop on the first floor, built an apartment for himself on the second floor, and used the fifth floor for a warehouse...
...I think I prefer it the old way...
...Rubin took the bottom floor and had tenants on the top three...
...In early 1985, Goedig came back to deal with the situation—a job he figured would take about a month...
...William Tucker PITY THE NEW YORK LANDLORD The heir, the immigrant, the refugee, the operator, and the fiddler—legends, each one of them, in the rent-controlled city...
...He rented for a while, then decided to buy his own building...
...It's relaxing...
...The tenants retaliated by lighting fires and stealing electricity from neighboring buildings...
...Predictably, the tenant flew all the way from New Zealand to defend the apartment...
...Instead of one tenant we would have been fighting a whole building," said Mrs...
...Above him was an artist from New Zealand who had the same arrangement...
...Thus, Stash (who has not paid rent in six months) continues: I thought to myself, Don't let the fact that he is pretending to be a kindly old geezer, all alone in the world, fool you...
...she demanded...
...When Robert Chambers, the "Preppie Murderer, " was charged with killing Jennifer Levin during a late-night tryst in Central Park, his mother raised the legal fees by doing what everybody else in New York does when they need money—she stopped paying rent...
...Here they torture you...
...We just had a baby taken to the hospital after being infected from a leaking sewer line...
...There are so many more beautiful old buildings in New York that need rescuing...
...Well, I don't think I have time to politically educate you," she fairly spit at me over the phone...
...I would provide them services, make repairs, show them I care about the building...
...What kind of story are you writing...
...The morning I closed the sale I went down to the fuel-oil company, plunked down a $1,000 deposit, and said, 'Start pumping oil at 273 East 3rd.' " An hour later she got a phone call...
...Vacancy rates have been below 3 percent for a decade, and 17,000 homeless people—the equivalent of the city's police force—spend winter nights in more than one hundred welfare hotels and shelters...
...We're fighting for our lives down here...
...Crack vials littered the upper bedrooms...
...There are no rent controls, and tenants hold all the cards...
...Mantello...
...In a sense, she was very apologetic...
...On the market, the apartment is probably worth about $1,200...
...The artist couple still kept complaining and the EPA eventually fined Jevmerov $15,000...
...The following are tales that illustrate this bizarre cycle...
...She said it didn't matter...
...Rubin lost $4,000 in back rent and was forced to pay the tenant $10,000 to give up the loft...
...In fact, the whole neighborhood was rapidly deteriorating from a combination of drug dealing and landlord-tenant disputes...
...Trying to find a more cheerful subject, I asked him how he liked California...
...Oh, I was in a rage...
...All of them said essentially the same thing: "Why don't you go back to Texas...
...He is still living in the building...
...An aspiring violinist, he graduated from the Juilliard School of Music and toured the United States and Canada with chamber ensembles...
...With the help of five hired accomplices, Mrs...
...Now I can fix up all three apartments and rent them for $1,500 a month...
...Vail replaced all twelve basement beams and added a new roof, for $20,000...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989...
...She started with a loft building on the Lower East Side...
...The tenants waiteduntil he left, then ripped them out again...
...His new book, The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policy, will be published next fall by Regnery Gateway...
...For a whole 2,000-square-foot floor, Rubin collected $500...
...The criminal court judge looked at the case and said, "This isn't really a criminal case, it's a housing case...
...The building had 402 housing violations and twenty virtually identical apartments that—due to the patchwork of regulations—rented anywhere from$76 to $450 a month...
...Within a few weeks, several reader responses were printed...
...It's too late,' she said...
...The tenant said around eight a.m...
...In 1988, Jevmerov went into liquidation and lost everything...
...I met Goedig on a frozen February morning in 1987...
...The die is cast.' " Winestone turned out to be one of those college-educated, freelance radicals who roam the streets of New York administering justice...
...He claimed to be living with his parents in New Zealand only temporarily while studying art...
...The court sided with the tenants...
...In Slaves of New York, Tama Jano- witz's best seller about New York's underground art world, there is a scene in which "Stash" Mantello, a young hustler-artist, confronts his landlord, Old Vardig, about the lack of heat in his rent-controlled apartment...
...I understand protecting the old people, but protecting fellow yuppies with bargains...
...When "Preppie Murderer" Robert Chambers was charged with killing Jennifer Levin, his mother raised the legal fees by doing what everybody else in New York does when they need money—she stopped paying rent...
...He showed me through the building—including a glimpse of one of his tenants through a chain-locked door...
...It was another illegal arrangement, winked at by officials...
...I could fill it with good tenants in five minutes, people who would pay the rent every month and never give me a bit of trouble...
...Old Vardig said...
...He was forced to lay off most of his employees...
...Her main problem was a tenant who lived on the second floor, directly above her office...
...This gesture was doubtless intended to signify fealty to, or at least admiration for, the Prince of Darkness...
...Over the first year, on a $96,000 rent roll, Vail collected $2,600...
...Their lawyer, Mark Frescq says that Steinberg was the shiftiest tenant he ever encountered...
...Gelman found himself facing crippling financial losses...
...They immediately upped their demand to $150,000...
...Given free rein, the tenants had ravaged the upper floors, ripping out plumbing fixtures for scrap and selling off furniture...
...When Rubin went for an eviction, the tenant told the housing court that he hadn't been getting any heat...
...Well, I'm an artist too...
...The oil truck had been waylaid by a committee of tenants who were refusing to allow any oil deliveries to be made...
...He shut down the heat, turned off the electricity, and tried to starve the tenants out of the building...
...No one paid rent...
...In the midst of the strike, I called Winestone to get her side of the story...
...As Irving Welfeld points out in his new book, Where We Live: A Social History of American Housing,' half of New York City landlords do not even have a high school education...
...He'd just say, 'Oh, you hit me at a bad time,' or I'll meet you around the corner in ten minutes.' Then he'd never show up" So why didn't the landlord bring eviction proceedings...
...All up and down West 120th Street, beautiful brownstone buildings—once owned by striving middle-class black families like Goedig's—stand with their windows boarded up by sheetmetal and cinder blocks...
...In 1986, Jevmerov lined up a buyer for the building who agreed to pay the couple $100,000...
...The housing court eventually forgave her $10,000 back rent because her living-room ceiling had a leak...
...He had not paid rent in four years...
...In 1984, a serious operation left Goedig's mother unable to walk...
...She asked a man from the neighborhood to manage the building for her...
...The judge asked the tenant what time he usually turned it on...
...Tenants had often spent thousands of dollars making the lofts habitable...
...said Fresco...
...Rubin said the tenant had agreed to provide his own heat...
...Rubin filed a complaint in criminal court for attempted murder...
...If Vail had any further questions, she was to consult Ann Winestone, the tenant leader on the fifth floor...
...The tenants were told to pay their back rent...
...Brave New World," he said...
...Each time the phallic device was lifted, those in the know would recite, "Ave, Satanus," "Hail, Beelzebub," or something similarly deferential toward Moloch...
...She bought another one in Harlem...
...Old Vardig looked at me with soulful eyes...
...They think the world owes them a living because they're artists...
...By now, probably everyone knows how rent control has ruined New York's housing market, creating a perpetual "housing crisis...
...Taylor forced her husband, a victim of Parkinson's disease, into her car and drove around for two days before being apprehended Mrs...
...A two-alarm fire resulted...
...Leshka As a lawyer and a psychopath, Steinberg of course, would have been the perfect tenant organizer...
...By this time, several months had passed, and it was obvious Goedig wouldn't be going back to California soon...
...Finally, after two years in housing court, Rubin succeeded in getting an eviction...
...For all intents and purposes, that was the end of the reception...
...I've replaced the toilet twice and tried to evict everyone, but it's hopeless...
...Paying $475 a month, Steinberg and Nussbaum were $24,000 in arrears...
...Six months later, the tenants' petition for taking over the building came before the housing court...
...William 7-ticker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...
...There was no central heating, but each tenant provided his own heat...
...I decided I would prove to my tenants I was different," she said...
...The thieving manager had fled, but the building was still infested with drug dealers...
...I've been to all kinds of weddings in my life...
...The inspectors found one "rent-impairing" violation—acracked support beam in the basement...
...Beautiful," he said...
...The industries soon moved out, but for decades the city government refused to rezone the area for other uses...
...His parents wanted him to have a career so they helped him escape...
...Goedig was told he would have to restore complete services to the building before bringing any action for nonpayment of rent...
...Rent control, after all,promises people they can exploit their landlords...
...In China, when they want to take your property, they just kill you and get it over with," she said...
...Since the tenant hadn't turned on the heater until eight a.m., Rubin was violating the housing law...
...These people cry poverty but they make much more money than I do...
...Meanwhile, she and several other tenants had learned of the city government's "tenant interim leasing" program, which allows tenants to drive off their landlord and convert the building to a nonprofit cooperative, in which tenants can buy their apartments for $250...
...I've been to mixed marriages with co-celebrants, where baby-faced Episcopalian clerics fresh out of the seminary get smoked by red-hot rabbis fresh from the Catskills...
...Sifting through the ransacked remains of his old bedroom, I found a picture of Goedig when he was eight years old...
...Chambers iscurrently suing her landlord for an additional $40,000...
...I looked at the people who were buying buildings and said, 'If they can do it, why can't I?' " She knew that small landlords have difficulty in New York, but—like so many others—tended to think it was their own fault...
...He also bought a building in Manhattan's Chelsea district...
...Here they torture you...
...She entered a nursing home...
...I was just heating up a little soup for dinner," he said...
...Goedig grew up and married, moved to California, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 19 and became a hospital technician...
...In 1983, at the age of 28, Jevmerov purchased an old, five-story industrial structure in lower Manhattan...
...Steinberg and Nussbaum shared a one-bedroom, rent-regulated apartment in a landmark Greenwich Village building that was once the home of Mark Twain...
...What has been less noted is that Steinberg was also another freeloading New York tenant...
...The vacancy rate is over 20 percent [actually 18 percent...
...But I never went to another marriage like Elaine's...
...Incredibly, the judge turned it down...
...Winestone and two other tenant leaders—both educated, middle-class people who sold jewelry on the sidewalks—vanished...
...She said she had nothing against me, just `big landlords.' I told her I only had one building and hadn't owned it for more than a week...
...Members of her family once operated a hotel in Szechwan Province...
...Winestone left the courtroom in tears...
...A whole industrial floor of 2,000-3,000 square feet could rent for only a few hundred dollars...
...She claims the water leak caused damage to her rugs and wallPaper...
...When Rubin asked for the rent, he slashed her tires...
...Yet none of this ever discourages anyone from believing his landlord is an evil manipulator with almost supernatural powers...
...She decided to sell the building...
...By this time, HPD—the Department of Housing Preservation and Development—had entered the case on the tenants' side...
...The Refugee Claudette Rubin is a tough woman—a Chinese immigrant, about 50, with jet-black hair and a guttural voice...
...What is needed are politicians who will crack down even more harshly...
...Still, when I found out at a tenants' meeting that 30 of the building's 34 apartments rent below $200 and that most of the tenants in those cheap apartments make more money than I do, I was a bit outraged...
...They fought back in housing court, telling the judge they weren't getting any services...
...Jevmerov was forced to spend $150,000 in additional borrowed money to make the two $450 apartments legal...
...He was actually living in New Zealand and "In China, when they want to take your property, they just kill you and get it over with," Rubin said...
...Seven families were temporarily routed, although no one was injured...
...There is a T-shirt widely sold in New York that bears the following message: "Live Cheap...
...No windows, and old scabbed walls, cracked from the water pipes, which were covered in a fine, furry mildew...
...Ann Gross Taylor, 56, of New York City, was arrested in Colorado for allegedly kidnapping her estranged 78-year-old husband, John Max Taylor, from his new home in Pro-vg Utah...
...Since landlords are believed to be fabulously rich—and universally evil—no one raises much objection...
...He asked them to pay $1,000 a month rent...
...Eventually Elaine became so enraged at his antics that she dashed across the kitchen floor, smashed him on the back of the head, and knocked him down eighteen or nineteen steps to the ground floor vestibule...
...If New Yorkers are so smart, why can't they see that what exists now is more than unfair...
...He sent it back to housing court...
...Out of this transformation grew the SoHo art district...
...I worked eighteen years to make something for myself and now I have nothing," said Jevmerov...
...There are thousands more just like them in the rent-controlled city...
...He turned out to be a crook, stealing rent money and filling the building with friends who were drug dealers...
...Sitting in a neighborhood bar an hour later, I asked Goedig why he persisted...
...She marched into my office and announced the tenants were 'taking the building.' There was nothing I could do about it...
...Suddenly Vail had three vacancies...
...Everyone went into the back room and got ripped, none more so than the groom, who, a few hours later, when guests began to file out, stripped to his underwear and proclaimed that no male guest could leave without first wrestling with him out on the kitchen floor...
...On February 24, 1986, two men in Gelman's hire poured forty gallons of gasoline over the basement and tried to burn down the building...
...Marry Your Shrink and Screw Your Landlord...
...Gelman left the courtroom, sobbing, "My two-year-old daughter will grow up a stranger to me...
...a few weeks later, Elaine was an ex-wife, an ex-satanist, and an ex-New Yorker...
...Fiddling While the Building Burns" Gregory Gelman emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1978...
...Jevmerov went to housing court for an eviction...
...Rubin says she is considering going back to China...
...The sun shines all the time...
...The satanists considered this very poor form...
...Neither had a lease but both claimed to have a verbal agreement from the previous landlord to keep the rent at $450 in perpetuity...
...I asked Vail about it later...
...Charges against him were eventually dropped...
...Every landlord on the street is asking me, `How did you do it?' No one's ever heard of a landlord getting three vacancies before...
...Brent Musburger, the CBS television sports commentator, once skipped owing $7,000 after a rent strike...
...A few years ago, the New York Daily News printed the following letter from a woman named Karen Wilson: I recently moved to New York from Texas and I pay $1,000 a month for a nice little apartment on the Lower East Side...
...They say they want to save housing, but first they want to destroy small owners so they can take over all the buildings for themselves...
...In addition, the Loft Board told Jevmerov he would have to bring the building into compliance with the residential building code...
...As always in such rent strikes, no one had any intention of paying the back rent...
...He showed little emotion, but he took it home with him...
...After a decade, she decided to try New York...
...The solution for regulation is even more regulation...
...Old Vardig lived down in the basement...
...This is how the average New York tenant confronts his landlord...
...The day after the court notice came through, the tenant firebombed her office, nearly burning down the building...
...The building was confiscated during the Cultural Revolution and half her family was murdered...
...The little girl hadn't even died—she was still in a coma—and we had dozens of calls from people asking if the apartment was going to be available...
...You can never win being a landlord in New York City...
...The landlords have been reasonable, and the building is clean...
...Rubin had escaped with her parents in 1949 and settled in the United States, where she studied architecture and married an American...
...The tenants followed all the usual procedures...
...Expecting to meet Donald Trump, he discovers Old Vardig...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 21 were besieged with phone calls...
...Goedig took me downstairs into his family's old apartment...
...Jevmerov offered the third-floor couple $25,000 to vacate...
...Then his mother's health began to fail...
...A familiar pattern ensued...
...Every time Goedig went back to housing court, HPD and the court charged him with not providing adequate services...
...and started a rent strike...
...Last April, Gelman was convicted of first-degree arson...
...Everything my mother and father worked for during their entire lifetime is wrapped up in that building," he told me...
...A Carnegie Hall recital was reviewed in the New York Times...
...His mother's old wheelchair stood eerily in the center of the living room...
...They are all true...
...The answer—to anyone familiar with New York housing—is obvious...
...It's stupid...
...I've been to the kind where half the VFW hall is reserved for the wedding party but you have to share the men's room with the vets, so the Vietnam vets in your half of the buildingget into fistfights over Agent Orange with the WWII vets from the bar on the other side of the building...
...They train tenants down there to destroy their landlords...
...Tenants can lie, but landlords must tell the truth," he said...
...The building was sucking me dry," he said...
...Nonetheless, once Lisa Steinberg's beating made the papers, alert apartment hunters saw an opportunity...
...It was a jimdandy, complete with what I took to be a grail, an ornate ceremonial dagger, and a phallic ritualistic instrument periodically elevated above the gathering in what seemed like a parody of the Catholic mass...
...Trained as a carpenter, Jevmerov did an apprenticeship for ten years, then started his own business doing customized woodwork interiors...
...The man was a drug addict on welfare and never paid rent...
...said Mrs...
...The building was being converted to a co-op and her husband was the lease-holder...
...He has not seen them since...
...Your life is personally endangered...
...He] opened the door and I slipped in...
...They had already decided to go on a rent strike...
...I would provide them services, make repairs, show them I care about the building...
...Judge Jeffrey Atlas was so offended by Gelman's "refus[al] to accept responsibility" for his acts that he sentenced Gelman to the maximum—fifteen-years-to-life, with no possibility of parole for fifteen years...
...The couple complained to the EPA, which demanded that Jevmerov spend another $200,000 to comply with dust-control regulations...
...Carrying a $3,000 monthly mortgage, however, he was forced to subsidize his two tenants...
...The ominous message, "Property of the City of New York, Managed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development," is stenciled on every building...
...Morris Park in central Harlem...
...We were afraid of what he might do with the other tenant...
...His father died in 1981, but his mother continued to run the building...
...Goedig immediately tried to evict the tenants...
...The buyer backed out...
...Robert Chambers, represented by top-of-the-line defense attorney Jack Litman, eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter and is serving a five-year-minimum sentence...
...The inside was a shambles, although traces of its former elegance shone through...
...The explanation finally becomes that landlords themselves are subverting the system...
...What do you want, Mr...
...The district attorney argued the crime had been particularly heinous because Gelman had been "trying to get the building out of rent regulations...
...As it stands now, that building is worth $75,000...
...Because the arrangements were illegal—and because the tenants were often providing fixtures and amenities for themselves—rents were remarkably low...
...The Loft Board legalized the rent at $450 a month and put the apartment under rent stabilization, meaning rents could climb only about 5-10 percent per year...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 maintaining the New York address only to avoid paying New Zealand's high income taxes...
...The tenants had long since broken through the locked door and were using it to store sinks stolen from a nearby construction site...
...When the city government finally caught up by rezoning the area for residences, tenants and landlords found themselves in a delicate situation...
...They demanded $100,000...
...Phyllis Chambers withheld $26,000 in rent over two years on her $2,300-a-month Upper East Side apartment...
...Meanwhile, "rent strike" signs popped up in every other window...
...At the wedding I was seated next to my best friend—the subway companion mentioned above—who had dated Elaine when she was still living in the City of Brotherly Love...
...In July 1987, Mrs...
...It was furnished with a variety of old cast-out furniture, broken chairs, and a sort of rotten desk with one leg held up by books...
...The gasoline exploded and the two men were severely burned...
...But the gesture was identical to one practiced at University of Texas football games...
...I can't believe it," she said...
...He borrowed $3,000 to have the plumbing reinstalled...
...They said it created too much dust...
...For all intents and purposes, that was the end of the marriage...
...The Longhorns happened to have a very good team at the time— they had won the national championship a year or so earlier—so they were in the news a lot...
...Borrowing $100,000, Rubin installed new sewers, heating, plumbing, and sidewalks, and reduced the number of violations to 189...
...The tenants ripped it out again...
...For firebombing her office, the tenant got to keep the apartment...
...Leshka It was best to let sleeping dogs lie...
...For the third or fourth time, Goedig confiscated fifty feet of heavy-duty electrical wire the tenants were using to steal power from a neighbor's basement...
...The case has received national attention and made the cover of Newsweek...
...Taylor later told the Salt Lake Tribune that she had planned to take her husband back to their $530-a-month rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West...
...If he did not spend "a certain amount of time" on the premises, Mrs...
...Jevmerov borrowed more money and made more renovations...
...He built a reputation and soon had his own shop with a dozen employees...
...We "I decided I would prove to my tenants I was different," Vail said...
...Vail soon met Winestone...
...In 1985, two years after he had bought the building, Jevmerov went into Chapter Eleven...
...rr he ceremony was soon over and 1 the witches and warlocks shed their black robes...
...But the city government doesn't want that...
...By this time, Jevmerov realized that the New Zealand tenant wasn't using his apartment at all...
...Long addicted to cocaine, Steinberg also battered his common-law wife, Hedda Nussbaum, over a period of years...
...Jevmerov's business was going well—he had thirty employees—but now the third-floor tenants began to complain about having a woodworking operation in their building...
...I think I prefer it the old way...
...In Texas, $300 will pay rent on a two-bedroom apartment with air conditioning, washer/dryer, swimming pool, fireplace, and garage...
...It must seem like coming back to the Old World to be back here...
...And landlords are not a hated breed...
...A Barnard graduate, she paid $250 a month in rent while working as a short-order cook...
...The judge let him keep the apartment...
...Her life is in danger...
...One was a fairly successful contemporary painter and his wife, who rented the entire third floor for $450 a month...
...Later divorced, Rubin ran her own contracting business in New Jersey, rehabilitating old housing...
...Faced with an ultimatum about back ren4 he probably would have called in the building inspectors, had the building blanketed with code violation...
...In the 1960s, desperate landlords started renting entire floors to artists, who—using their own money—transformed them into residential studios...
...Everybody knows of somebody who has a terrific deal, but when they look in the papers all they find are studio apartments renting for $1,200...
...He had the accent and persona of many nationalities—a big handlebar mustache encrusted with food, but whether this was an Armenian, Greek, Spanish, or Jewish mustache I couldn't say...
...The difference is I have to work for a living...
...What few people comprehend, however, is the kind of municipal madness to which the system eventually leads...
...When she went to court, he threatened to kill her...
...They were right, of course—the copper pipes and wiring had long been destroyed...
...The family lived in a basement apartment while renting out the top three floors...
...The tenant admitted this was true—he had operated his own kerosene heater...
...Suddenly I'm a big operator...
...They would also lift their right hands into the air, with the three middle fingers tucked inside the palm and the thumb and pinky protruding...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
