A 59-storey skyscraper in the financial district of Manhattan, previously a sought-after residential building that boasted luxury amenities and some rent-stablised units, has become anything but a desired place to call home, as more than a dozen residents complained to the New York Times that the building’s malfunctioning elevators have made it more of a “high-rise hell”.
Since late fall, New York City tenants living in the 750 apartment units at 20 Exchange Place have been caught up in an engineering and electrical maelstrom that has led to near daily elevator outages, sometimes lasting for hours, and making it near impossible for residents with mobility issues to easily access above the 15th floor.
In interviews and emails conducted with the Times, many residents detailed how the elevator woes had upset their routines, with some cancelling doctor’s appointments, arriving late to work and some even considering moving out entirely.
One Google reviewer described the building as recently as one month ago as being “horrible!!”, adding that they hadn’t received any offer of “rent discounts” and communication remains “terrible”.
“DO NOT LIVE HERE! This is your warning now. Over priced, bad communication, horrible management, and on top of that if you have an emergency, you’re stuck up in your apartment,” 20x Resident wrote in their review.
The owners, DTH Capital, believe the explanation behind their building’s terminally stalled elevators, which have also been known to drop too quickly unexpectedly before the safety stop kicks in, is the electrical surges from the Con Edison equipment being used to move the cabins up and down the 59-story building.
Additionally, DTH told the Times that they’ve even sought out the expertise of third-party elevator, electrical and engineering teams, but have yet to resolve the problem.
“These experts have so far been unable to determine the source of the surges and believe that we will not be able to do so without the full collaboration and 24/7 support of Con Edison,” DTH Capital said in a statement, the Times reported.
For their part, Con Edison told the Times that extensive testing had been run at the site, but they found “no indication that our power supply is deficient or compromised”.
“To date, we have not been presented with any plausible theory as to why the elevator problems, which have developed since work to install a new elevator system began, are related to Con Edison equipment or service,” the utility company said in a statement to The Times, adding that they’ve also tapped a nonprofit called the Electric Power Research Institute to assist in its investigation.
Mechanics are on-call at 20 Exchange Place 24/7, the owners add, noting that they’ve even changed property management companies in an effort to assist in liaising with residents.
In a Q & A section on Yelp for the apartment complex, the first, and most commonly asked question, by information seekers is: when will there be working elevators?
A person, who identified in their Yelp response as a tenant of 20 Exchange, explains that, as of 25 March, “we have not been informed when there will be normally working elevators in the high rise and mid rise sections of the building”.
They go on to add that there “is one elevator running at times for the high rise apartments”, but concede that even that one can be unpredictable.
“Sometimes it is running, sometimes it is not. We don’t know in advance when it will be running.”
The owners of the apartment complex told The Times they’ve offered some tenants with mobility concerns hotels rooms and furnished apartments on the lower levels, sometimes even outsourcing to entirely different apartment buildings in the neighbourhood.
