Two weeks ago Lux Living reported that Stuyvesant Town residents were instructed by management to make their own privacy walls from lucky bamboo and garbage found in local dumpsters. Tenants were furious that Tishman Speyer was mocking the pressure wall debacle that left many tenants with no place to stash their bitter roommates because the original walls blocked out sufficient amounts of sunlight and air in addition to being a fire hazard.When the local bodegas ran out of lucky bamboo tenants of Stuyvesant Town were forced to roll up their sleeves, swallow their pride, and dig through dumpsters on the complex to find discarded pieces of sheet rock and lumber to make their own pressure walls. Day after day tenants of the luxury rental complex toted garbage home and began to construct their own walls.
"This is absolutely disgusting," said Tiffany Whitewater-Stone, a market rate tenant who just moved to the city from Utah. "My lease states that I would have a pressure wall. Nowhere does it say that I would have to rummage through dumpsters for drywall and build it myself! There was Chinese food all over it!"
Tenants were just starting to get settled in - despite the fact their apartments looked like Vietnamese slums - when they received another email from Tishman Speyer.
"Dear Tenants,
We are sorry to inform you that residents must remove the new walls they recently constructed. It seems that not all residents properly cleaned their materials resulting in a huge increase in the volume of calls requesting extermination services.
A management representative, along with a Tri Line Construction crew, have begun inspecting apartments affected by the pressure wall situation and started removing your homemade walls. This email hopes to clarify any misunderstandings that may have arisen when tenants have come home to semi-demolished apartments.
We appreciate your cooperation and thank you again for living luxuriously in Stuyvesant Town.
- Tishman Speyer"
Residents at 522 East 20th Street have gone so far as to collect the remnants of their demolished walls, pictured above, and rebuild them. One resident tells us, "I survived Hurricane Katrina, I can survive Stuyvesant Town."
It's getting harder and harder to differentiate the garbage in the storage rooms from the actual apartments.
Did you mean Tiffany Whitewater-Barlow or Tiffany Whitewater-Stone? We have people ready to bring her back to Yearning for Zion.
This place is a sty
I wish they would stop taking pictures of inside my Beulette's trailer. It's an invasion of privacy.
Earlier today, a young student-like person was moving into a building on 14th Street. He had both the outer and inner lobby doors propped open on the T level. An older tenant asked him to please not keep both doors open as her daughter had encountered a rat that had run into the lobby a few days ago when someone was moving in. Luxury???
Oh, now I know why there was a laundry-room cart full of garbage in the hallway when I came home last night. Part of the reconstruction of the reconstruction project. I guess the slices of bread were being used as spackle.