After more than two decades of half-starts, interminable delays, court battles, and plenty of intrigue and infighting, the rent-stabilized building at 644 Riverside Drive – whose traumas City Limits chronicled nearly ten years ago – is undergoing renovation as part of a third-party transfer agreement that will turn the property over to tenants to run as a co-op, ultimately transforming these renters into owners. The same holds true for the adjacent building at 640 Riverside Drive.
Supervising the multimillion-dollar rehabilitation project is the temporary owner of both buildings, the SHUHAB Housing Development Fund Corporation, a nonprofit affordable housing developer in Manhattan. The daily maintenance of the properties is being overseen by the Queens firm Wavecrest Management.
The lackluster gray 644 complex would hardly garner a second look from the outside. Yet beyond the main entrance doors, the premises are abuzz with activity. Built nearly a century ago, the building’s aging pipes and infrastructure are sorely in need of repair, and two-man crews venture back and forth from the lobby to assorted floors carting garbage bags, ladders and tools. Meanwhile, tenants like Elliott-Bloodman are being temporarily moved into vacant apartments there or next door at 640. But for many tenants, the project has produced far more headaches than simply short-lived discomfort. From the perspective of Elliott-Bloodman and many of her neighbors, the latest installment in this long and often sad housing story is as fraught with frustration and unfairness as the previous chapters. But change is coming to this collection of 229 units – glacially, painfully – and maybe even to “the system” of tenant complaints, enforcement, and the too frequently inequitable housing court.
River view ... and shoddy landlords
When she first arrived to 644 just over 30 years ago, Elliott-Bloodman fell in love with its surroundings. “I always liked the water and I wanted to be close to it,” she says of the Hudson. “And the park was nearby for my children to play.” In those days, she recalls, repairs were done with relative ease. “The super was like family. You'd knock on the door, tell him what was wrong and he'd send someone right over. He knew that his job was to service us,” she says.
But those comparatively idyllic moments, longtime residents say, didn't last, as conditions at 640 and 644 rapidly eroded during the late 1970s. “We've had a long and tortured history,” says Bill-Lee Lanndis, a 20-year resident at 644. In a period spanning one of the city's most turbulent eras in the late 1970s and lasting well into the '90s, ownership of the properties bounced between the notorious landlords Andonis Morfesis, whom tenants reportedly dubbed “Devil Landlord,” and Alex DiLorenzo III, who gained further infamy in 1990 as the owner of Happy Land, the Bronx social club where 87 people were killed in an arson fire. “Those guys were shady millionaires who got all this money from owning these buildings, but never spent a dime on them. They ran them into the ground,” remembers Lanndis. “We had to walk around with flashlights because there was no electricity and vagrants slept in the lobby.”
