New York Landlord Gives Ice Cream in Lieu of Gas

NEW YORK, NY — The tenants of an East Village apartment building haven't had gas since May 18. But they have plenty of ice cream.

Around a dozen people who live at 325 E. 12th Street apartments protested Thursday night because 26-year-old controversial landlord Raphael Toledano hired a Ben & Jerry's truck for an "ice cream social" to appease them.

They haven't had working gas for almost three months. You can imagine how well the ice cream went over.

Tenants told The Real Deal they haven't been able to cook in three months. One said the landlord hasn't done "diddly squat" about the problem.

Three weeks before Thursday's protest, tenants of several of the buildings Toledano owns put together a list of demands and concerns to present in a meeting scheduled with Brookhill Properties. Toledano never showed up to the meeting. None of the demands have been met since, tenants said. The next thing the tenants heard after the meeting was that Toledano was throwing them a Ben & Jerry's ice cream social.

"This guy comes out of the comic books," SaMi Chester, a tenant organizer with Cooper Square Committee, told Patch about Toledano. Chester has witnessed Toledano's antics in real time throughout the past year while he has represented Toledano's tenants. "You can't continue day in and day out with horrible behavior and then one day you wake up and go, 'I know! I'll solve all this with some Rocky Road ice cream.'"

A spokesperson for Brookhill Properties responded that they have done what they could about 325 E. 12th St., and it was now ConEd's responsibility to fix the gas problem:

"The gas issue is a city wide problem that has affected hundreds of buildings in dozens of neighborhoods City Wide, not just the building you cite. This problem needs to be addressed by Con Ed and City officials. Responsible landlords such as Brookhill have been diligently working with both Con Ed and the City to remedy these issues as quickly as possible. A solution requires all parties, including Con Ed and the City working together, to solve this problem."

A ConEd spokesperson said Friday:

Gas service is curtailed due to an internal gas leak on the property that must be repaired by the building owner. Once the repairs are completed, Con Edison will perform safety inspections to determine if gas service can be safely restored to the building.

The Ben & Jerry's vehicle was parked on East Fifth Street between Second and Third avenues Thursday evening. It moved from its originally planned location outside the apartment because of the protest. After a few minutes of protesters surrounded the truck screaming, "Ice cream, you scream, we all scream for cooking gas!" it drove off, according to The Real Deal.

"We didn’t impede anybody's ability to get ice cream, that would be dead wrong," Chester joked. "But we did make ourselves very, very visible we were very loud, I think Gandhi and Malcolm and Doctor King would have been very, very proud of us. It was very, very cool."

This is far from the first controversy surrounding Toledano, who comes across as a loose cannon in this The Real Deal profile from June. Tenants have said he pushes up the rent in his East Village buildings to alleviate the high mortgage on his buildings. Chester says another one of Toledano's buildings didn't have gas for 245 days and there were concerns earlier this year about lead and asbestos poisoning in another one.

Nina d'Alessandro, a tenant of one of Toledano's buildings and a founder of an organized group of over 200 of his tenants, told Patch that when Toledano's company began construction on the building next to hers, the workers didn't follow regulations. They didn't clean up their dust, and they didn't cover the apartments they were redoing with plastic sheets to protect the tenants from toxins, she said. The tenants got city officials to come test for lead levels, and they found the levels were 16 times over the health limit, d'Alessandro said.

d'Alessandro told Patch of the many intimidation tactics Toledano has used to get her and her rent-stabilized neighbors out of the building over the past year. Groups of men in suits began persistently knocking on doors and offering buyouts by the end of summer of 2015. They were such a regular occurrence by the end of summer of 2015 that the tenants took to calling them the "Men in Black," d'Alessandro said.

Toledano himself would follow tenants outside of the building at night and threaten them with a folder he held of lease violations he claimed they had committed. At least a few tenants have already paid thousands to settle with Toledano out of court, d'Alessandro said. Some of them took a buyout after spending all that money on a lawyer, d'Alessandro said.

d'Alessandro, who has lived in the East Village since the 1970s, said Toledano's persistent harassment has actually brought her tight-knit community together. "We've developed a real sense of pride and ownership of the neighborhood and deep sense of community, and I think Toledano doesn't realize how strong this community still is," she said.

In May, Toledano paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit in which tenants of 444 E. 13th St. sued him for trying to harass them out of the building. They secretly recorded him telling them made-up reasons why they should move out, including police were inspecting the building for drugs, rents would be jacked up soon and the neighboring building would soon be demolished and construction on it would be too loud.

"There's always been another reason for him to force tenants out, including harassment," Chester said. "He's doing all of this, like, secret agent stuff. It's like he's Inspector Gadget, but none of the gadgets work."

Image by Mike Mozart/Flickr/CC by 3.0