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UPDATE: UWS Apartment Complex Won't Let Rent-Stabilized Tenants Use Gym
By
Lauren Evans
Published Feb 25, 2014
Modified Feb 25, 2014
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Stonehenge Village
By
Lauren Evans
Published Feb 25, 2014
Modified Feb 25, 2014
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[UPDATE BELOW] A swank Upper West Side apartment complex has all the amenities one might expect from a luxury building—a doorman, on-site laundry, a fitness center, and plenty of other perks to keep high-paying tenants happy and comfortable. What's that, you say? You're a rent-stabilized tenant? Oh, well, that was a mistake—I'll just be taking that key back, the gym is really only for our, well, our real tenants. You can just run around the park, with the pets.
According to the Post, a new gym at Stonehenge Village on West 97th Street is only available to approximately 40 percent of the building's tenants, the other 60 percent having the gall to belong to the city's increasingly scarce cadre of residents living in rent-stabilized apartments. Stonehenge tenants association president Jean Green Dorsey, 74, told the tabloid banning more than half the building from the fitness center is "insulting and unnecessary."
"Are you going to ask us for passbooks next, like in apartheid?" she asked.
Several calls to Stonehenge management were unreturned, though a spokeswoman for the complex reportedly defended the discriminatory practice.
“The small gym we built and opened this week is different in that it is aimed specifically at new and prospective tenants who expect certain amenities and incentives that are commonly available to market-rate renters,” she explained to the Post.
Rent-stabilized tenants are, after all, more accustomed to having their bathrooms collapse and their boilers axed, and might become overstimulated in the presence of such opulence. And anyway, we don't want them to start expecting things, now do we?
Update, 4:20 p.m.: Public Advocate Letitia James held a rally outside the Stonehenge today, calling the practice of excluding rent-stabilized tenants from using the gym a form of segregation and "blatantly illegal," DNAinfo reports.
Residents explained what it felt like to live in a place where access to building amenities is out of reach. Treda Palmer Saxton spoke of the embarrassment she felt at not being able to use the new gym, like when she's forced to explain to her 7-year-old goddaughter why they can't enter the facility. "I have to tell a child that I'm not good enough," she said.
James said that her office intends to file a discrimination complaint with the New York State Human Rights Division against Stonehenge Village.
Tagged
rent stabilization
Upper West Side
Lauren Evans
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