Crown Heights residents struggle with persistent elevator issues

CROWN HEIGHTS, Brooklyn (PIX11)—Tenants at an apartment building in Crown Heights are speaking out about a faulty elevator that has not been working for nearly three months.

The elevator is preventing elderly and disabled residents from running errands and making appointments. 

Emily Rose Prats lives at 1296 Pacific Street and is battling with arthritis in her spine. She finds walking up and down the stairs challenging. With an elevator outage in the building, she said taking the steps to and from her third-floor apartment is her only option. 

“I’ve had to start going to physical therapy again, and they’re like, you’re having this instability because you must be climbing a lot of stairs, and I’m like interesting,” said Prats. “I am.”

Seventy-four-year-old Wayne Starks often finds himself trapped in his fifth-floor apartment, unable to do simple tasks like grocery shopping. He walks with a cane and suffers from a collapsed airway in his lungs.

“I get anxiety for these stairs,” Starks said. “I can’t believe that we have to go through this, and there’s no help out there for us.”

A spokesperson for the management company, Pinnacle Management, told PIX11 that, as of Wednesday, a sign stating that repair work has been completed is now plastered on the elevator. They’re waiting for the New York City Department of Buildings to inspect the elevator, which is required to return it to service.

Still, the update offered little comfort to tenants who said they’ve been enduring this issue since April.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” said tenant Manvir Singh. “We’ve tried really hard to reach out to our landlord, to do repairs on our own, to do what we can to sort of manage and mitigate, but it really has been struggle.”

Residents claim there have been building issues for years. A search of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development records reveals that the building has 204 open violations. 

Rent is set to go up later this year, intended to help with property maintenance, but residents argue that landlords are failing to uphold their responsibilities.

“The rent has gone up every year I’ve been here, and the issues have just gotten worse and worse,” Singh said. 

A spokesperson for the NYC DOB says the landlord's elevator maintenance company, Sentry Elevators, recently requested an inspection for the elevator at 1296 Pacific Street. The NYC DOB expects to schedule a date for that inspection so that the elevator can get back up and running as soon as possible.