By: Mario Mancini
Residents of a downtown historic high rise luxury building are prisoners in a gilded cage. The elevators go in and out of service on a daily basis leaving them trapped as high as 59 stories in the sky. As Covid ebbs and flows and people are making moves in and out of the city, everyone is looking for deals in luxury buildings. “When it was completed in 1931, the City Bank-Farmers Trust Company Building towered over the financial district as one of the tallest buildings in New York City. It was, in fact, the tallest with a stone-clad facade, which featured 14 Assyrian-style busts, called “giants of finance,” watching over the narrow streets from their perch on the 19th floor.
Replicas of coins from around the world adorned the entrance, representing countries where National City Bank — which would later become Citibank — had branches. The 59-story building, at 20 Exchange Place, is now a bustling residential high-rise with more than 750 apartments, featuring luxury amenities, stunning harbor views and some rent-stabilized units. Tenants breeze into the lobby, with its soaring ceilings and elaborate marble mosaics, and into Art Deco-style elevators to reach their homes”, according to The New York Times.
Anyone paying luxury rents would expect a number of amenities. One would also expect basic necessities like an elevator to work without issue. Any elevator issues must immediately taken care of but, The New York Times reports, “since November, the skyscraper has been plagued by long elevator outages that have turned daily life upside down and trapped residents with mobility issues inside their apartments. Elevator service is unpredictable and often nonexistent, for hours at a time, above the 15th floor. The elevators that service only the lower floors have continued to work, even as the outages in the others have grown more frequent in the last two months. The city received 25,376 complaints about broken elevators in 2021, according to city data, not an outrageous number for a city with more than 70,000 elevators and escalators. The problems have been particularly acute in public housing.”
“The building’s owners, DTH Capital, say that Con Edison must step in to resolve the problems, which they maintain are likely related to electrical surges from Con Edison equipment. The owners say they have hired teams with elevator, electrical and engineering expertise to get to the bottom of the problem, which is affecting eight elevators. “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.”
Con Edison, in turn, told The New York Times, “it has conducted extensive testing at the building and 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.” Con Edison added that it had hired a nonprofit called the Electric Power Research Institute to assist in its investigation.”
