July 9, 2008 Meeting- review

This past Wednesday we again met in our buildings lobby.

We discussed:

-Changes to this website- we will add a method to contact the site admin.

-recent PACC employee changing- we have a new Super and Porter

-Bed bug activity in New York City- Nobody in out building has heard or seen anything here.

-Upcoming new officer elections- there will be a shuffling around in September.

-City council representatives and their level of involvement at our level- much debate here.

-The need to distribute minutes to all building tenants, despite whether they attend meetings or not.

-Specific building/tenant problems: retribution for the lack of heat over the past few winters, the ongoing problems with our door locks, past maintenance requests that have gone unanswered, among other things.

-PACC being recently fined by the Court when they said there were no lack-of-heat problems, but then proven wrong.  This was when PACC took one tenant to court for other matters.

This meeting turned out to be a little spirited, but we ended with some ideas for our next actions.

Next meeting in 4 weeks.

Ongoing door issues

Besides the lack of heat in the winter, our biggest problem at 277 Gates is the unending door breakage.

Lately, every single door into the building (barring always-locked cellar doors) has been broken at the same time. This is a new low in the buildings security.

The back door, leading to the garbage and recycling area and eventually to a gate that lets out onto the street, in currently unable to close, no matter how hard you slam it. It simply will not catch.

The two front doors can be functional if shut properly, but are almost never done so. They must be closed completely by whoever is passing through, letting the mechanisms catch. If they are left to close on their own, they simply will not shut- they will stop before locking completely, though from a distance they will appear closed.

This is perhaps the most common complaint that tenants in the building have. We have asked PACC to fix the doors once and for since the very beginning of our Tenants Association, almost a year ago. It is true that have come and fixed the door in dire situations (such as when the lock freezes shut, or when the door knob/paddle completely falls off) but within a few days the doors are broken again. I do not know why.

Personally, I cannot understand why I've never seen this perpetually-broken-door at other places I frequent- my job, past addresses, school, stores, etc. I think many of us are looking for answers.

Front Door Follow-Up

The front door lock is finally fixed, but only after two weekends (one of which was Memorial Day).

Sad to say, the new paddle gets stuck in the open position. This means the door only works half the time.

Front door broken

The front doors are always a problem at 277 Gates. Out of the two of them, at any given time one always seems to have problems closing too quickly, not locking, or not closing.

Yesterday sometime during the day the lock on the inner door broke. It has a lever on the inside to open it and a key lock on the outside, but both were broken and the door was taped open.

I hope this is resolved soon as we sometimes get non-tenants hanging out in our lobby and laundry room.

Website launch

Welcome to the new website of the 277 Gates Tenants Association.

Here we will be posting recent meeting discussions, recurring maintenance problems, photographs, links and articles concerning the tenants of 277 Gates Avenue, Brooklyn, NY.

Check back for further information about the building and tenants including our history, the landlord, the neighborhood and our organizing of the Tenants Association.