Stuyvesant Town Lobbies Get Glam Makeovers

Residents of Stuyvesant Town continue to be awed by Tishman Speyer's constant upgrades and overall improvement of the complex. After all, this is the company that discovered grass could be kept in pristine condition when it is ripped up and replaced on a weekly basis. Stuyvesant Town's lobbies are the latest spaces to get Tishman Speyer's glamorous touch.

Years ago, Stuyvesant Town residents were told that each lobby would have a state of the art flat screen TV installed to keep residents up to date on the frequent service problems, utility outages, and criminal activity on the complex. Unfortunately plans for the communications project were scrapped due to budget concerns. Instead, Tishman Speyer decided the most efficient way of communicating with their residents was not by utilizing modern technology to provide real-time information but through Xeroxed fliers made popular in the '80s. The ambitious endeavor quickly ran into trouble.

"We always want to keep our tenants informed," says Tishman Speyer spokesman, Bud Perrone.  "If we expect outages in any of the buildings, we like to give our residents a full two hours notice so they won't be inconvenienced by their lack of heat, hot water and gas. We started noticing enraged tenants tearing the fliers off the wall, ripping them into little pieces and stomping them into the ground which kept other tenants uninformed. Their anger management issues created a huge communication problem for us," he says. "We didn't know what to do."

Perrone said Tishman Speyer looked into various ways of communicating with their tenants including e-mail blasts, a telephone hotline, and even a website where tenants could log in and check the progress of work being done to their buildings. "These were all good ideas, in particular the e-mails,  but as you know we haven't had much luck with e-mails," he says referring to the  incident where Stuyvesant Town's concierge service, Abigail Michaels' Oval Concierge, revealed their entire mailing list to their subscribers.

Tishman Speyer decided to leave technology to the experts and retool their original flier concept. "After many long and intense meetings, Rob Speyer came up with the brilliant idea of laminating the fliers and gluing them directly to the faux-marble walls," says Perrone. "This way the bitter tenants would have a much harder time tearing them down."

The project is a huge success! Residents can now stay informed of the latest services outages in their building and their blinding rage is curbed by the laminated and dry mounted signage. "Now if we could only do something about the drug activity and violent crimes in the stairwells, we'd be golden," Peronne laughs.

Photo submitted by a Sty Spy.