CHELSEA — Tenants living in a West 19th Street building have been without cooking gas for more than four months — and a few have opted to move out rather than endure the outage with no end in sight.
Residents of 463 W. 19th St. went without hot water for more than a month last spring after a fire broke out in the restaurant on the building's ground floor.
Meanwhile, the building’s heat and cooking gas stopped working around mid-October, and gas has yet to be restored, resident Jorge Bendersky said.
Many of the building’s tenants — who were offered gym memberships in lieu of hot water when it originally stopped working — have since moved out, he said.
The building houses 48 apartment units based on its certificate of occupancy, a DOB spokesman said Tuesday.
“There hasn’t been any improvement [since the fall],” said Bendersky, who’s been heating up food on a hot plate for months. “I just feel that they’re letting the building down because they want everybody out.”
In November, a spokesman for then-managing agent Royal Rock Realty said workers who inspected the building’s aging cooking gas lines discovered they’d need to be replaced.
A senior property manager at Choice Management New York, which started managing the building on Royal Rock’s behalf at the end of last year, said that situation still stands.
The company has been mulling the possibility of installing electric stoves throughout the building, but it’s unlikely the property's antiquated electrical lines could sustain them, manager Rosa Rodriguez said.
The building is no longer accepting new tenants, as it's "unfair to rent an apartment that has problems to someone," she said.
“We kind of came into a difficult situation, and we’ve been trying to do our best to see what the best possible way of solving this [is],” she said. “We in absolutely no way are trying to run tenants out.”
Nevertheless, at least two tenants have moved out since the cooking gas stopped working. Bendersky estimated that half of the building is currently vacant.
One former resident, who asked that her name be withheld, told DNAinfo New York she moved out a few weeks ago because she “couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Finally feeling like a human being again,” she wrote in an email.
Another anonymous ex-tenant said he’d been planning to move out when his lease was up this coming summer, but ended up leaving on Feb. 15 “because of the lack of gas.”
Former resident Rachel Crittenden, who lived in the building for two years, moved upstate in July before the lack of cooking gas became an issue.
“I was going to move anyway, because there were just other issues, but… the [lack of hot] water was the absolute deal-breaker,” she said.
At the time, she suspected Royal Rock might want tenants to move out so it could redevelop the property.
“There are… million-dollar apartments across the street from [the building], and the High Line,” she noted.
But Bendersky, who has a rent-stabilized apartment, says he's not going anywhere, despite his concerns that a hot plate and other electrical uses are overloading the building’s electrical grid and creating a safety issue.
“It’s very hard to relocate in the city,” he said. “Very hard and expensive.”
