Decent unit, WORST management
Pros
The building is located right down the block from the 127th street entrance into the 125th street A/B/C/D train stop, so you could get literally anywhere in the city in under 20 minutes. A lot of the people on the block have been here for generations and, if you take the time to get to know them, they can be very friendly and love to tell stories about the neighborhood from "back in the day." The apartments themselves are railroad style, two units per floor, with southern and northern exposure, so plenty of room to fit your needs and plenty of natural light throughout (assuming you're on one of the higher floors). The unit is perfect for roommates as the mixture of bedrooms and common spaces creates a layout that gives everyone plenty of space so you don't feel like you're on top of each other, which can be gold in a city like NYC.
Cons
This management team was easily the worst I've dealt with in 20 years of renting. The unit was advertised as rent stabilized and I even asked multiple times during the showing just to confirm and was told the whole building was a stabilized building, but when it came time to sign the lease, I was told there was a "mistake" and that the building was not actually stabilized. I knew this was incorrect because a friend of mine has lived in this same building for almost a decade and has shown me her rent stabilized lease, but any attempt to better understand what happened was met with an argumentative stance that we were "already receiving a deal" and that the apartment could be rented for much higher if they wanted. Unfortunately, I had already broken my previous lease to move into this building and didn't feel like I was in a position to argue, so moved forward with the lease signing. I did order a rent history after moving in and it looks like it was indeed deregulated several years prior, but there was no way to tell if it was legally done or not and that doesn't change the fact we were roped into the unit under false pretenses. Communication with management remained strained from that point on. Any time we emailed with issues, they were slow to respond and, when they did, they were often argumentative, condescending, and dismissive to the point where we started taking care of issues on our own the best we could to avoid having to speak with them. One issue that comes to mind is we had a rat (not a mouse) living in our walls and it took them 3 months to finally send someone to take care of it, which consisted of pouring poison into the walls and letting it die in there. For months after, we could smell the rotting corpse of the rat every time we walked into the apartment and, when we called about it, they told us the smell would go away after the corpse "mummified" from the hot and dry conditions of the inside of the walls. The real killer, however, were the bedbugs. To make a long and painful story short, we dealt with the issue on and off for 2 1/2 years as management never treated the whole building at one time - just unit per unit as complaints came in, so the bugs would just migrate throughout the building. It was bad enough that we would even see them in the stairwell during the day. When the bugs finally made their way back to our unit after our initial spray treatment (2 1/2 years prior), they finally agreed to heat treat our unit as well as our next door neighbors at the same time, but our faith in their ability to address the issue in a manner that wouldn't result in its return was lost and we ultimately broke our lease and moved out after treatment was completed.
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