Wonderful value and appreciated, with flaws
Pros
The street is so quiet and with the trees and parks nearby, it's heavenly. I had big huge windows in my apartment that let in lots of amazing light. The building is absolutely gorgeous with so much character. The shower pressure for me was always amazing and with nice, hot water. The location is just so amazing, and the rent price was really good, even though it went up quite a bit each year. I've lived here for four and a half years and loved it for the most part.
Cons
My apartment was always really cold in the winters. Getting a heated blanket really helped the past couple of years, but I reached out to the landlord and he came by to try and put some sticky foam between the window cracks, but they would just fall out over the winter and he never really did anything else about it. My pipes in my shower would clog at least once a year, but I guess they are working on fixing that now. This year, every resident was forced to leave the building by May 31st due to renovations and I was still charged for my last month's rent. The walls are really thin - you can hear conversations from the next door neighbors and footsteps upstairs. The stairs and lobby look a bit rough, and water regularly leaks from the pipe overhead in the lobby. Finally, package theft has been QUITE rampant in this building for me, especially over the last couple of years, and there is no sense of security, really. Be careful about leaving your keys out or letting strangers into the building, even though it's a safe neighborhood.
Advice to the owners
Please take care to improve the security in this building! Even just putting in a fake camera in the foyer would help a lot, I think, and I really think you need to take this seriously so that we feel safer here and have less package theft.
Do not live here.
Pros
It's... a place to live. The outside is nice. The heat is fine.
Cons
I lived here for six months before giving up. I wasn't even broke, just wanted a place on the UWS near my work. Let's start with the building: When you walk up, it looks like it's going to be amazing. The neighbors are all wealthy single-family brownstones. Why would this one be different? You get inside, and there's a massive hole in the ceiling patched over with a piece of blue plyboard. There's water leaking from a pipe that they've tried to fix two times (and counting) but are too cheap to replace. The bannisters aren't connected to the stairs in a lot of places, and the stairs are covered with dust and trash, because the landlord doesn't bother to clean regularly or to send someone to do it. Neither he nor the building manager, who's the rudest guy I've ever met, live in the building. There are weird smells like sewage that penetrate the building every few weeks. The guy living below me once came up to ask if I had done something different with the plumping recently because there was sewage dripping into his apartment. To the apartment: There are literally no amenities - I got a tiny fridge and a plug-in two-burner cooktop. No oven, no microwave, nothing else. I bought my own small countertop oven, and when I moved out, the manager claimed that it was now apartment property and demanded that I leave it for the next tenant or he would charge it to my security deposit. The water pressure is super weird: The water from the sink will occasionally turn boiling hot for a few minutes, and there's nothing you can do but wait. The cold water pressure is horrible. I got used to waiting 30+ seconds to fill my water bottle because the cold water is just a trickle. The same boiling water thing happens with the shower, and if you try to make it colder, the water pressure drops dramatically. You just have to wait until it comes back, which can take 5-10 minutes. Told this to the landlord and he basically said there's nothing he can do about it. The landlord and the manager are scammers. When I moved out, they raised the rent of the apartment by $300. Advertised it as south exposure when it's north-facing. Never available, never answer texts, slimy people. Save yourself the trouble and live in Inwood.
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