DO NOT rent from Bronstein Properties, under any circumstances. I lived in one of their buildings in Washington Heights for a year. In that time, the bathroom ceiling fell in three times because of a plumbing leak in the apartment above that Bronstein refused to have properly fixed. Whenever we tried to reach the property manager he had changed cell phones and couldn't be reached. Then the super would show up and try to apply a coat of plaster over the leaking ceiling instead of fixing the leak. We asked multiple times for a plumber, and instead the super would give us some song and dance about how the tenants upstairs weren't closing their shower curtain properly. Then, within a a few days, the ceiling would completely fall in, wood boards and all. Then it would take weeks, and multiple phone calls, and 311 complaints to get anyone to come fix it. Then... wash, rinse, repeat.
The living room ceiling fell in once - giant heavy chunks of plaster scattered everywhere. When I finally got hold of the property manager, his summation of the situation was a shrug and, "This is New York, sweetheart." Yeah dude, and in New York, we believe in ceilings that stay put.
The best / worst part, however, was the infestation of hornets that moved into our kitchen wall. They built a giant nest inside the wall after entering through a crack in the outside bricks. We spent weeks asking the super to call an exterminator for us (the property manager had presumably switched out his burner phone again, and was unreachable.) Instead of calling an exterminator, the super plugged up the hole in the outside wall with caulk.
Now imagine that there are maybe a thousand hornets trapped inside your kitchen wall. They can't get out. If you were a hornet, what would you do?
Exactly. They all came in.
Take a Stephen King movie. Set it in a New York apartment. Cover every surface of that apartment with giant hornets. Crawling. Flying. Up the windows, in the flower-pots, ricocheting from window to window. That was our life, for the three weeks in which Bronstein Properties first refused to acknowledge the problem, then refused to deal with it. The "exterminator" that they sent showed up in shorts and a t-shirt, with what basically amounted to a fancy can of Raid, told me that he was scared of wasps, and wouldn't get close enough to the nest-hole to put poison inside it. He did haphazardly spray at wasps flying past us though, covering the apartment with poison. (Then he asked me if I was single.) We ended up going out of pocket to get a real exterminator, who told us that the nest was gigantic and should have been dealt with much sooner. Bronstein Properties then refused to reimburse the expense.
The day we moved out, we talked to two tenants in the elevator. One of them was upset because her living room ceiling had just fallen in - on her elderly husband, who was sleeping on the couch at the time. Just another day in the life of Bronstein Properties...
Are there going to be hornets in your apartment? Well - unless you move into my old one - maybe not. But what's certain is that WHATEVER problem occurs - and these are old, badly maintained buildings, so problems are certain - Bronstein Properties will do whatever they can to avoid dealing with it, and you'll be living in rubble until they do. read more