Kris
January 10th, 2004, 09:14 PM
January 11, 2004
The Art of Surviving When It's Cold Inside
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
A chilling blue dawn crawled across Twana Frye's window in the Bronx, illuminating a scene from another era, perhaps another country. It was 18 degrees outside. Inside, the rooms were frigid, except for the kitchen, where the oven was set at 375 degrees, its door wide open.
In the stale warmth of the oven, Miss Frye set about the task of bathing her baby girl. She boiled water in a pot, and then poured it into a small plastic tub with colder water — part of the tricky art of living without hot tap water. Six-month-old Inijah coughed and wheezed as Miss Frye, 19, passed a sudsy cloth over her chest.
"You get tired of going through this," said Miss Frye, who lives on the sixth floor of 1405 College Avenue. Three weeks earlier, she had taken Inijah to the emergency room with a fever of 104 degrees. "If we had hot water, I wouldn't have to get up so early. It's not so hard to give heat."
Living without heat is an annual game of survival for thousands of New Yorkers across the city's five boroughs, a brutal challenge to stay warm. Ovens and space heaters become constant, if sometimes deadly, allies. The enemy can simply be a broken boiler, but too often it can be a cheap, irresponsible or absent landlord.
Every winter, the crucible is endured: tenants turn on ovens, light candles, wear gloves and hats to bed and listen for the hiss of the radiator as if it were the sound of a long-awaited train. This ritual in heatless living provokes a mixture of creativity and improvisation, and gives rise to a kind of urban folklore captured in painful miniature by the residents of three small brick-facade tenements in the Bronx.
There, facing off against the cold has become something of an art form.
There is Fitz R. Craig, who lives in Apartment 3A of 54 East 176th Street, in Tremont. A Grenadan immigrant, he devised a heat distribution system involving four pots of boiling water and a fan.
The method used by Carol Parker, who lives with other relatives and Miss Frye in Apartment 6J of 1405 College Avenue, near Claremont Park, involves a metal wok, four pots and the carefully choreographed opening of bedroom doors.
These tenants hardly live in isolation: Since Oct. 1, the city's 311 hot line has received more than 97,000 complaints of heat or hot water problems in New York City buildings — 3,226 calls last Wednesday alone — and has taken legal action against 962 buildings, including the one at 1405 College Avenue.
But it is often a game of cat and mouse: because the city's 300 housing inspectors usually notify landlords of their impending visits in an effort to get the heat back on as fast as possible, residents say that some landlords ratchet up the heat in time for the inspection, then turn it down once inspectors leave. Even when a landlord is taken to court, many of the building's tenants are stuck with huge electricity and cooking gas bills from the use of space heaters and ovens.
"The last bill I had was over $500," said Ms. Parker, who got help paying the bill from a welfare office. "But they're not going to help me with December, January and February."
Ms. Parker, a mother of four, kept a log of the room temperature in her apartment in December, with Dec. 4 holding the record low of 36 degrees. The building has been cited for 264 violations, ranging from insufficient heat (most recently on Dec. 19) to water leaks and mold, dating to 1978, according to city records.
To ward off the cold, Ms. Parker fills the wok and four pots with water. The boiling pots emit steam, and the wok cooks the water in the oven, letting off more heat. Then comes the science: "I close all the doors and then open them one at a time," she said, flickering her fingers toward the three bedrooms. "That way, it circulates through."
Circulation is also the central component of Mr. Craig's method. His aging fan whirs at four pots of boiling water, he explains. "It circulates the heat from the stove," said Mr. Craig, 79, waving his hand at an apartment filled with his wife's doll collection and framed by pink nylon curtains. "It blows it around. Otherwise the heat will go up to the ceiling."
Upstairs from Mr. Craig, on the third floor of 54 East 176th Street, a 31-year-old man who would not give his name said he ran his shower and left the door open to make heat. The bathroom is next to his living room, making it a convenient source of heat. "The vapor spreads around," the man said.
These are tenants who can recite the phone numbers of their landlords by heart, they have called so many times to complain.
To describe life on the sixth floor of 1405 College Avenue, Darnell Tyler, 40, put it this way: "You're standing outside with no clothes on. That's how it feels. I mean, come on, man."
Heat and hot water in both buildings are included in the rent but had been sporadic at best, according to tenants, until a reporter called the property managers last week. Representatives of the buildings denied there were any major heating problems and said the tenants had not complained. Then, city inspectors dropped by the two buildings in midweek, and found the heat to be within legal limits.
Landlords are required by law to maintain an indoor temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit during the day when the temperature drops below 55 degrees outside. At night, if the outside temperature drops below 40 degrees, they must maintain an indoor temperature of 55 degrees.
When this fails to happen, the culprit is often a faulty boiler, and in lower-income buildings, landlords are less likely to have the money to fix it, said Carol Abrams, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which oversees the inspections. "The heating system costs the same for a Bushwick building as it does for a Park Avenue building, but the rent roll in the Bushwick building is much lower," Ms. Abrams said.
But problems with heat and hot water are not confined to low-income neighborhoods. The city is beleaguered with aging heating systems — 60 percent of New York's 130,000 multiunit residential buildings were built before 1947, according to city officials.
Sometimes, landlords do not realize how much fuel is needed to get through a winter, Ms. Abrams said. The city often bails them out, either by sending mechanics to fix a boiler or by delivering emergency fuel; the city also provides low-interest loans so owners of buildings that mainly house low-income tenants can upgrade their heating systems.
For tenants, the consequences are tough, with electricity bills soaring. Some 41,000 Con Edison customers had their power turned off in New York City and Westchester County during the past heating season, though 96 percent of them had it turned back on. (A company spokesman said that Con Edison worked diligently to avoid cutoffs and referred customers in need to federal aid programs.)
And sometimes, the cold has fatal results. In January 2003, five people died in fires in New York City as a result of the misuse of space heaters, according to the Fire Department. In November, a man, his mother and his infant daughter died in their home in the Bronx after they inhaled carbon monoxide fumes from a gas-powered generator. They had used the generator after their electricity was cut off because their bill had not been paid.
Several weeks later, in December, Bienvenido Baez, a 56-year-old livery driver, was found dead in his apartment at 98 West 183rd Street in the Bronx. He died from a combination of ailments, including bronchial asthma, according to the city's Medical Examiner's office. Tenants said that when he died, the building had been without heat for days, which could have exacerbated Mr. Baez's asthma.
In the heart of University Heights, the red brick building where Mr. Baez had lived is a worn version of its old stately self. Chipped crown moldings frame the lobby, and cracked marble steps line the stairways. The sound of coughing echoes up and down the six floors.
"Everyone's sick," said Flerida Garcia, 43, wearing a black wool hat and grasping a crumpled tissue. She lives in Apartment 5G and she, too, suffers from asthma.
The 41-unit building has been without cooking gas since Thanksgiving, when a gas leak in Ms. Garcia's apartment prompted the Fire Department to turn off the building's supply. In a building where heat is elusive, tenants said they had been used to turning on their ovens. But they no longer can. They cook on hot plates distributed by the landlord and hover around electric space heaters, if they can afford them. A heater costs about $50.
(The building's landlord, Omran Feili, and city officials said that cooking gas should be restored by Wednesday, once extensive pipe repairs are complete. "We have heat all the time," Mr. Feili said. City documents show that the building was cited for a heat violation in February 2003, one of 230 violations, of different kinds, dating back to 1979.)
Everyone in Ramona Vasquez's apartment on the second floor has the flu. On a recent weekday, a rare wave of heat slipped from her radiator into the three-bedroom apartment, but her children remained clustered around the three space heaters.
"The cold comes through the windows," said Ms. Vasquez, 44, who said she took two of her children and her 3-year-old grandson, Jhoan Luna, to the emergency room on Monday because their fevers were so high. "I'm not O.K. either," she said, her face red from a recent coughing spell.
In the kitchen, Johanny Alvarez, 24, Jhoan's mother, is cooking a pot of rice with sardines on the hot plate. Jhoan roams around the apartment, breathing with a small gurgling sound, and then lands near the bed where Remy Salazar, 13, one of Ms. Vasquez's sons, is huddled under blankets.
Cough syrups and antibiotics are clustered on his bedside table. He stares glassy-eyed at the television, which beams an image of palm trees and golfers from the Mercedes Championships in Hawaii.
"The weather in Maui is 74 degrees," says an announcer for ESPN. Ms. Vasquez, a Dominican immigrant, has lived in the building for 18 years, but she said she never thought to complain about the lack of heat and hot water until Mr. Baez died. The death also caught the attention of a tenant organizer, Deepika Bains, who had two meetings with the tenants last week in an effort to take the landlord to court.
"Most of the tenants are immigrants, and a lot of them don't speak English and don't know what their rights are," said Ms. Bains, who works for the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a housing advocacy organization. "A lot of people are scared to talk about things."
But, to Ms. Vasquez, the more frightening thing was Mr. Baez's death.
"I'm scared now," she said. "I can't keep quiet."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The Art of Surviving When It's Cold Inside
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
A chilling blue dawn crawled across Twana Frye's window in the Bronx, illuminating a scene from another era, perhaps another country. It was 18 degrees outside. Inside, the rooms were frigid, except for the kitchen, where the oven was set at 375 degrees, its door wide open.
In the stale warmth of the oven, Miss Frye set about the task of bathing her baby girl. She boiled water in a pot, and then poured it into a small plastic tub with colder water — part of the tricky art of living without hot tap water. Six-month-old Inijah coughed and wheezed as Miss Frye, 19, passed a sudsy cloth over her chest.
"You get tired of going through this," said Miss Frye, who lives on the sixth floor of 1405 College Avenue. Three weeks earlier, she had taken Inijah to the emergency room with a fever of 104 degrees. "If we had hot water, I wouldn't have to get up so early. It's not so hard to give heat."
Living without heat is an annual game of survival for thousands of New Yorkers across the city's five boroughs, a brutal challenge to stay warm. Ovens and space heaters become constant, if sometimes deadly, allies. The enemy can simply be a broken boiler, but too often it can be a cheap, irresponsible or absent landlord.
Every winter, the crucible is endured: tenants turn on ovens, light candles, wear gloves and hats to bed and listen for the hiss of the radiator as if it were the sound of a long-awaited train. This ritual in heatless living provokes a mixture of creativity and improvisation, and gives rise to a kind of urban folklore captured in painful miniature by the residents of three small brick-facade tenements in the Bronx.
There, facing off against the cold has become something of an art form.
There is Fitz R. Craig, who lives in Apartment 3A of 54 East 176th Street, in Tremont. A Grenadan immigrant, he devised a heat distribution system involving four pots of boiling water and a fan.
The method used by Carol Parker, who lives with other relatives and Miss Frye in Apartment 6J of 1405 College Avenue, near Claremont Park, involves a metal wok, four pots and the carefully choreographed opening of bedroom doors.
These tenants hardly live in isolation: Since Oct. 1, the city's 311 hot line has received more than 97,000 complaints of heat or hot water problems in New York City buildings — 3,226 calls last Wednesday alone — and has taken legal action against 962 buildings, including the one at 1405 College Avenue.
But it is often a game of cat and mouse: because the city's 300 housing inspectors usually notify landlords of their impending visits in an effort to get the heat back on as fast as possible, residents say that some landlords ratchet up the heat in time for the inspection, then turn it down once inspectors leave. Even when a landlord is taken to court, many of the building's tenants are stuck with huge electricity and cooking gas bills from the use of space heaters and ovens.
"The last bill I had was over $500," said Ms. Parker, who got help paying the bill from a welfare office. "But they're not going to help me with December, January and February."
Ms. Parker, a mother of four, kept a log of the room temperature in her apartment in December, with Dec. 4 holding the record low of 36 degrees. The building has been cited for 264 violations, ranging from insufficient heat (most recently on Dec. 19) to water leaks and mold, dating to 1978, according to city records.
To ward off the cold, Ms. Parker fills the wok and four pots with water. The boiling pots emit steam, and the wok cooks the water in the oven, letting off more heat. Then comes the science: "I close all the doors and then open them one at a time," she said, flickering her fingers toward the three bedrooms. "That way, it circulates through."
Circulation is also the central component of Mr. Craig's method. His aging fan whirs at four pots of boiling water, he explains. "It circulates the heat from the stove," said Mr. Craig, 79, waving his hand at an apartment filled with his wife's doll collection and framed by pink nylon curtains. "It blows it around. Otherwise the heat will go up to the ceiling."
Upstairs from Mr. Craig, on the third floor of 54 East 176th Street, a 31-year-old man who would not give his name said he ran his shower and left the door open to make heat. The bathroom is next to his living room, making it a convenient source of heat. "The vapor spreads around," the man said.
These are tenants who can recite the phone numbers of their landlords by heart, they have called so many times to complain.
To describe life on the sixth floor of 1405 College Avenue, Darnell Tyler, 40, put it this way: "You're standing outside with no clothes on. That's how it feels. I mean, come on, man."
Heat and hot water in both buildings are included in the rent but had been sporadic at best, according to tenants, until a reporter called the property managers last week. Representatives of the buildings denied there were any major heating problems and said the tenants had not complained. Then, city inspectors dropped by the two buildings in midweek, and found the heat to be within legal limits.
Landlords are required by law to maintain an indoor temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit during the day when the temperature drops below 55 degrees outside. At night, if the outside temperature drops below 40 degrees, they must maintain an indoor temperature of 55 degrees.
When this fails to happen, the culprit is often a faulty boiler, and in lower-income buildings, landlords are less likely to have the money to fix it, said Carol Abrams, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which oversees the inspections. "The heating system costs the same for a Bushwick building as it does for a Park Avenue building, but the rent roll in the Bushwick building is much lower," Ms. Abrams said.
But problems with heat and hot water are not confined to low-income neighborhoods. The city is beleaguered with aging heating systems — 60 percent of New York's 130,000 multiunit residential buildings were built before 1947, according to city officials.
Sometimes, landlords do not realize how much fuel is needed to get through a winter, Ms. Abrams said. The city often bails them out, either by sending mechanics to fix a boiler or by delivering emergency fuel; the city also provides low-interest loans so owners of buildings that mainly house low-income tenants can upgrade their heating systems.
For tenants, the consequences are tough, with electricity bills soaring. Some 41,000 Con Edison customers had their power turned off in New York City and Westchester County during the past heating season, though 96 percent of them had it turned back on. (A company spokesman said that Con Edison worked diligently to avoid cutoffs and referred customers in need to federal aid programs.)
And sometimes, the cold has fatal results. In January 2003, five people died in fires in New York City as a result of the misuse of space heaters, according to the Fire Department. In November, a man, his mother and his infant daughter died in their home in the Bronx after they inhaled carbon monoxide fumes from a gas-powered generator. They had used the generator after their electricity was cut off because their bill had not been paid.
Several weeks later, in December, Bienvenido Baez, a 56-year-old livery driver, was found dead in his apartment at 98 West 183rd Street in the Bronx. He died from a combination of ailments, including bronchial asthma, according to the city's Medical Examiner's office. Tenants said that when he died, the building had been without heat for days, which could have exacerbated Mr. Baez's asthma.
In the heart of University Heights, the red brick building where Mr. Baez had lived is a worn version of its old stately self. Chipped crown moldings frame the lobby, and cracked marble steps line the stairways. The sound of coughing echoes up and down the six floors.
"Everyone's sick," said Flerida Garcia, 43, wearing a black wool hat and grasping a crumpled tissue. She lives in Apartment 5G and she, too, suffers from asthma.
The 41-unit building has been without cooking gas since Thanksgiving, when a gas leak in Ms. Garcia's apartment prompted the Fire Department to turn off the building's supply. In a building where heat is elusive, tenants said they had been used to turning on their ovens. But they no longer can. They cook on hot plates distributed by the landlord and hover around electric space heaters, if they can afford them. A heater costs about $50.
(The building's landlord, Omran Feili, and city officials said that cooking gas should be restored by Wednesday, once extensive pipe repairs are complete. "We have heat all the time," Mr. Feili said. City documents show that the building was cited for a heat violation in February 2003, one of 230 violations, of different kinds, dating back to 1979.)
Everyone in Ramona Vasquez's apartment on the second floor has the flu. On a recent weekday, a rare wave of heat slipped from her radiator into the three-bedroom apartment, but her children remained clustered around the three space heaters.
"The cold comes through the windows," said Ms. Vasquez, 44, who said she took two of her children and her 3-year-old grandson, Jhoan Luna, to the emergency room on Monday because their fevers were so high. "I'm not O.K. either," she said, her face red from a recent coughing spell.
In the kitchen, Johanny Alvarez, 24, Jhoan's mother, is cooking a pot of rice with sardines on the hot plate. Jhoan roams around the apartment, breathing with a small gurgling sound, and then lands near the bed where Remy Salazar, 13, one of Ms. Vasquez's sons, is huddled under blankets.
Cough syrups and antibiotics are clustered on his bedside table. He stares glassy-eyed at the television, which beams an image of palm trees and golfers from the Mercedes Championships in Hawaii.
"The weather in Maui is 74 degrees," says an announcer for ESPN. Ms. Vasquez, a Dominican immigrant, has lived in the building for 18 years, but she said she never thought to complain about the lack of heat and hot water until Mr. Baez died. The death also caught the attention of a tenant organizer, Deepika Bains, who had two meetings with the tenants last week in an effort to take the landlord to court.
"Most of the tenants are immigrants, and a lot of them don't speak English and don't know what their rights are," said Ms. Bains, who works for the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a housing advocacy organization. "A lot of people are scared to talk about things."
But, to Ms. Vasquez, the more frightening thing was Mr. Baez's death.
"I'm scared now," she said. "I can't keep quiet."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company