Times Find Chumley's Landlord Is Bad Person

This just in: The New York Times has discovered that the slumlord that owns the Chumley's building and the neighboring building is not an upstanding citizen. They don't get around to actually mentioning Margaret Streicker Porres' name until the SEVENTEENTH paragraph, but after that they go to town on her, even smacking her with the cardinal sin of not responding to a reporter's questions. (Journalist love to point out lack of cooperation; it always makes the other party look bad.)

The article spends its first 16 paragraphs detailing the miserable lives led by people who live at 56 Bedford. Among the plagues: mice, lack of heat, caved-in-ceilings, non-working fireplaces, collapsing bathrooms and illegal construction. It's weird to think of people living in slum-like conditions in the middle of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city.

Articles like this make you ask yourself fundamental questions about the way we live, such as: how is a person that allows other people to live under such condition not thrown in jail?; and, can it be that such landlords only care about money, that they have no shred of human decency or concern for the welfare of their fellow beings. I know these are naive questions. But you've still got to wonder. Such behavior just doesn't neatly fall under the usual dodge of "it's just business."

The article also contains the depressing news that the Buildings Department has issued no permit yet for the work needed to shore up the facade.

Hope Maggie's having a rotten day.

Chumley's Dark, But Still Standing—For Now

As night fell on the city April 6, Chumley's was still standing—despite the collapse of the bar's chimney, which separated from an interior wall during some illegal construction work—but the former speakeasy has gone dark, and will probably remain so for the next several months. According to Eater.com, "when the collapse occurred, construction workers were inside Chumley's and doing repairs of an unknown type without a permit. Violations for working with out a permit have been issued. Now, a shoring company has been hired to repair the damage, after which time inspectors will assess the integrity of the building."

So, let's take a look at the slumlord (not my word; many have called her such) that owns the Chumley's building, according to a Curbed.com account. Margaret Streicker Porres is her very long name, and that name has been in the papers quite a lot lately. The Village Voice named her one of NYC's 10 Worst Landlords in 2006, writing "In addition to Streicker Porres's 22nd Street buildings, she owns 10 others in Manhattan—a total of 198 units. The buildings have 692 violations, including 70 C-level violations, which require immediate attention and include inadequate supply of heat, hot water, or electricity; leaking ceilings; broken stairwells; exposed live wires; and rodents."

But the Voice, they're a bunch of left-wing reactionaries, right? OK, but what about the New York Times, that basically put Streiker Porres at the center of an April 2, 2006, article titled "A New Chapter in the Face-Off Between Tenants and Landlords." In the piece, the Times painted her as the queen meenie in the fight among landlords to evict rent-regulated tenants in order to "demolish" (read: convert to condos) apartment buildings. "Margaret Streicker Porres has built a business out of buying, managing and restoring run-down landmarked buildings populated with rent-regulated tenants, and has taken on her tenants in five separate downtown rent-regulated buildings, with mixed results," wrote the author. In both the Times and the Voice articles there's a horrifying story about how the landlord's harassment of an aging "former merchant seaman in his 70's and in failing health, with diabetes and heart trouble" very likely hastened his death.

Who is this vampiress? Well, she's not a female version of Ebenezer Scrooge, as you might imagine. She's a young woman in her 30s, according to the Times, graduated from Princeton in 1997 and then got a master's degree in architecture and real estate development at Columbia University in 2000. In her first professional move she bought "a property in Greenwich Village, and then filed proceedings against the rent-regulated tenants in the eight units." Nice.

Maggie comes by her greed honestly. Her father is John H. Streicker, chairman of the Sentinel Real Estate Corporation, described by the Times as "a large real estate company that manages a portfolio of $5 billion in assets for institutional investors, including 50,000 apartments." Daddy must be so proud.

A Google search also brought up a classified ad in which Streicker Porres cast about for a property manager. Qualifications? "Common sense is mandatory, ability to negotiate in tough situations is important." I bet. And then this at the end: "We like happy tenants!"