Pros:
The apartments are a good size, prewar. The heat was always great, so much so that we could wear shorts in the winter time.
Cons:
Bedbugs, which wasn't disclosed until after we signed the lease. Roaches, we had to fumigate ourselves...get the gel bait, it works wonders. Mice...we were constantly buying mice traps and catching them. We filled up the holes but nothing could keep them from coming in under the front doors. If you have terrible management and neighbors who aren't as clean as you, you will always have these problems. The tiles in the kitchen and the hallway were the cheapest peel and stick tiles you can imagine. They became displaced just by walking on them. We told the super, he put down more tragically cheap tiles. After that, we put down our own laminate floors in the hallways and in the bathroom. We had a leak from the upstairs neighbor who liked to wash the floors with buckets of water thrown down as if there were drains in the floor. The water leaked into our bathroom light fixture on the ceiling and the fire department had to turn off our power. I had just brought home my 2 month old from the hospital, she was a preemie and born early, so we were getting acclimated at home after such a long hospital stay. Disastrous. The ceiling grew MUSHROOMS because of the wet conditions and how long it took for the super to fix it. They always did patchwork, never truly fixed anything. For the most part, neighbors were somewhat friendly by NYC standards. Until we got the neighbor from hell underneath us. She was such a nasty lady and would be yelling and screaming about Jesus this and Jesus that at all hours of the day and night. She complained about everything and anything. During Covid she launched complaints against us for every step we took in our apartment, we never complained about her playing music loud, screaming and going into fits, just not being nice because that's what you accept when you live in a big apartment building. There's going to be noise, within reason. The management company never told us about the complaints because they knew she was bogus and was a complainer who would take them to court for everything...seems like she made a career out of it. We maintained our own apartment, painting, repairing, plumbing, electric because they never did anything the right way. It got to the point where I just didn't want them coming into our apartment unless it was major. And I didn't want them bringing any bug travelers in either. I liked the apartment, but with the maintenance issues and the one terrible neighbor, we decided to leave after 5 years once we could afford to. I know people who still live there that don't get good heat, have mold on the walls in the kitchen, get threatened by management. It's a horrible building with great bones, but is managed disgustingly and not maintained. There were two or three fires in the building the year we left, one of them on the same floor as us. We never felt completely safe because we were paranoid about bugs and mice, and then the one neighbor who started to become increasingly unstable. What made us move is that I thought she would become violent. DO NOT MOVE HERE!!
Advice to owner:
FIX EVERYTHING.