It has long been a not-so-well-kept secret that there is, among New Yorkers, a certain ghoulish, opportunistic element who, seeking better habitat, has been known to peruse the obituary pages in search of a freshly vacated living space.
Landlords tell of these people standing, hats in hand, waiting for the relatives of the newly departed to return from the funeral so that they might make an offer before the “For Rent” sign went up.
But the real estate market has gotten so taut in the last few years, and a decent apartment at a reasonable rent is so rare, that a new, more gruesome stratagem is being employed.
Instead of the death notices, apartment-seekers are now turning to the police blotter.
And they are not showing any signs of squeamishness about campaigning for the former dwellings of homicide and suicide victims, no matter how heinous the crime, or how many pints of blood have stained the finished oak parquet floors.
“You just would not believe what’s going on out there,” said a building superintendent in the East Village, Zbignew R., who is loath to use his full name when railing against prospective tenants because, after all, they are how he makes his living.
“Some people don’t have a problem with natural death. You know that happens all the time, and it’s a natural thing,” he said. “But when a guy puts a pistol to his head, and the word gets around the neighborhood, and the next day you got a guy banging on your door looking for an apartment for his brother, well, that’s a bit beyond the reasonable.”
Landlords, superintendents and property managers throughout the city marvel at the macabre ingenuity of today’s apartment hunter.
“It’s like the predator and the prey, the hunter and the hunted,” said Joe Pistilli of the Pistilli Realty Group in Astoria, Queens. “I’ve got tenants banging on old people’s doors in my buildings trying to figure out if they’ve died yet,” he said.
Usually a scavenger will wait until the body is cold, but the Gotham buzzard is a different breed. At one of the city’s recently empty–and somewhat infamous–nests, potential renters did not even wait to learn the fate of the tenants.
Those tenants are Camden Sylvia, 37, and her longtime companion, Michael Sullivan, 54, who disappeared on Nov. 7 from their $300-a-month loft apartment in lower Manhattan, after having an argument with their landlord, Robert Rodriguez, over a lack of heat.
A week later, Rodriguez vanished from his home upstate, telling his family that he was going to Manhattan to answer questions from detectives. He did not resurface until two weeks later, but has remained mum when it comes to the police.
When the authorities found a sneaker-clad foot underneath a pier near the World Trade Center on Feb. 13, they thought it might belong to Sylvia because she was reportedly wearing running shoes when she vanished.
At this point, things took a bizarre turn. A man who works for Rodriguez said that within a week after the foot was found, more than a half-dozen bargain-hunters called to ask if the apartment, despite its lack of heat, had become available.
“I want to reiterate that there is no apartment for rent, and it is not on the market,” Rodriguez’s lawyer, Joseph Marro, said recently.
The episode brings to mind an East Village apartment I inhabited about a year and a half ago. The guy above me was a mellow type who listened to the not-so-soothing sounds of a wave machine. It may have been that wave machine that drove him to kill himself with a bullet to the head.
There were inquiries about his apartment before the fresh paint had dried.
The new tenants in my old neighbor’s apartments had nothing to say, but others in the building were understanding.
“You do what you gotta do,” said one man still dressed in his pajamas in the middle of the afternoon.
