In meeting notes sent to all board members, board secretary Jason Sarnoff explained the rationale: "Regarding the vibrations that continue to disturb our board president, we unanimously agreed to request that [Sirulnick] continue to request and encourage [Chikurin restaurant] to install some additional vibration dampeners over and above the minimum required in the building code in order to reduce even more any vibrations that may be felt in the apartment above.”
Denny was devastated. Abbey Goldstein, the board's lawyer, believes the majority of board-members simply lost the stomach for a protracted and costly war of attrition. "There was a history of contention between Sirulnick and the board," Goldstein says. "Sirulnick basically was adamant and made it into a war. He dragged it out and the legal fees became quite substantial.”
Soon afterward, DOB inspector Michael Geraci determined that the restaurant's HVAC unit had been incorrectly installed and he issued a violation to Sirulnick's Seminole Realty. Until Sirulnick could prove that the unit had been properly installed, he was ordered to shut it off.
Yet the unit remained on. At a hearing before the Environmental Control Board on August 7, 2007, the violation was dismissed on a technicality, according to the DOB. It had been written to the wrong owner — to Sirulnick's Seminole Realty, not to Sirulnick's Boulevard company.
Inspectors revisited the building four weeks later and issued two new violations to Boulevard: one for incomplete plans that did not detail the installation of the HVAC unit, and another for failing to install vibration eliminators. A hearing was set for October 30. At the co-op's annual meeting on October 17, Denny declined to run for reelection. She'd had enough.
"If the board had any authority over the restaurant, we simply would have told [the owner] to take [the HVAC unit] down," Denny says. "But we don't have authority. It leaves us at the mercy of the sponsor. And it's not just me. The situation effects the entire co-op. … It undercuts all of our rights.”
Goldstein, the board's attorney, agrees. "The board has very little recourse or power to regulate which commercial tenants come in," he says. "In a cond-op, there is huge protection for the sponsor.”
In early November 2007, Denny's apartment was still vibrating.
Adapted from Habitat December 2007. For the complete article and more, join our Archive >>
Photos by Carol J. Ott