By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
EAST HARLEM — Three years ago, the residents of an East 110th Street apartment building lost their community garden to developers looking to build the first addition to Museum Mile in a half-century.
Now, they say, the project is ruining their homes.
Huge cracks have split open the walls of their building’s hallways. Floor tiles have fallen away. The brick façade is crumbling. All of it, they say, was caused by construction next door of an $80 million new home for the Museum for African Art and a 115-unit condominium tower overlooking Central Park.
“Every day we feel unsafe,” said Benay Chisholm, president of the 8 East 110th Street Tenants Association. “I worry that a day of panic will come when we’ll be running to get out of this building.”
The tenants’ non-profit landlord, Hope Community Inc., has consulted engineers and the Department of Buildings, and was assured that the building was safe to live in, Deputy Executive Director Carmen Vasquez said.
The cracking began after excavation of the museum land began two years ago, she said. The most serious damage occurred at the seams where the original building was connected to a second one. Since then, the building has racked up dozens of code violations.
Her organization, which manages 70 low-rent apartment buildings in East Harlem, has negotiated an agreement with the developer, Brickman, to fix the damage. All that’s left now is obtaining permits for the work, she said.
A Brickman spokesman confirmed that the company is arranging for the repairs. But the firm does not believe it is at fault.
“We’ve agreed to do repairs even though we don’t think the damage was caused by our work,” the spokesman said.
Kenita Lloyd, the museum’s deputy director, said in a statement that the institution took the complaints “very seriously, and will work with the building’s construction manager to ensure they are carefully examined.”
Once the repair permits are approved, work crews will begin shoring up the building and repairing the cracks with Sheetrock, plaster and concrete, Vasquez said. The repairs “will return the building to first-class condition,” she said.
For Chisholm and other residents, the damage is already done. They see the conditions of their building as another insult after what happened to their community garden, which was named Nuevo Esperanza.
In April of 2007, two months after the museum development plans were announced, activists climbed into trees and picketed the taking of their lot. But the bulldozers came and knocked down the plants and trees, leaving the residents to look elsewhere for a garden.
They still haven’t found a suitable replacement.
