By: Dean Weiner
New York City is full of interesting architecture and crazy characters, and some days both! A historic Manhattan building designated an official landmark by The Landmark Preservation Commission has been to led to rot and decay by a millionaire who lives like a hobo in Brooklyn.
The New York Post reports that Lisa Fiekowsky, 71, of Brooklyn is the owner of more that $8 million worth of properties in New York City while she lives out of her trashed-filled jalopy of a car.
City officials recently told The New York Post that Fiekowsky is now in their crosshairs for leaving one of her Harlem properties in such poor shape that the 125-year-old building in the Sugar Hill Historic District is unsafe and must be demolished.
Allie Griffin writes, “the site has racked up thousands of dollars in fines, countless violations and a city lawsuit over a nine-year period, prompting the Buildings Department to take matters into its own hands and plan to level the historic brick building at 451 Convent Ave.”
City agencies told The New York Post that the eccentric landlord — who owns two additional landmarked Harlem properties — hasn’t paid a dime of the thousands of dollars’ worth of fines she’s racked up and has had zero actual work done to repair the four-story building.
She has only filed a few work permits during the nine years the city has been begging her to make repairs to the landmarked rowhouse, records show. The work permits were eventually revoked each time for being incomplete.
New York City officials claim that Fiekowsky is deliberately letting the property decay so that the city will have no choice but to demolish the building for life and safety reasons. The property can then be sold for much more money as the lot is more valuable empty.
The Sugar Hill neighborhood of Manhattan has a lovely history. According to Wikipedia, for wealthy African Americans to live during the Harlem Renaissance. Reflective of the “sweet life” there, Sugar Hill featured rowhouses in which lived such prominent African Americans as W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Walter Francis White, Roy Wilkins and Afro-Puerto Rican Arturo Schomburg.
Langston Hughes wrote about the relative affluence of the neighborhood in his essay “Down Under in Harlem” published in The New Republic in 1944:
Don’t take it for granted that all Harlem is a slum. It isn’t. There are big apartment houses up on the hill, Sugar Hill, and up by City College — nice high-rent-houses with elevators and doormen, where Canada Lee lives, and W. C. Handy, and the George S. Schuylers, and the Walter Whites, where colored families send their babies to private kindergartens and their youngsters to Ethical Culture School.
