Jane Wood, 94 & Still Fighting for Tenants’ Rights
By Gloria Sukenick

Street theater, or in this case, lobby theater, was the vehicle chosen by Jane Wood of the Chelsea Housing Coalition to protest the tactics of her landlord, Mark Scharfman. Scharfman is in the process of renovating the building at 274 West 19th St. where Wood has lived for many years. As we all know, being a longtime resident of a building doesn’t make you a favorite of any landlord these days. And, if in the process of renovating, it is possible to make the life of any long-term tenant a misery, well, that’s all to the good. After all, these tenants are those most likely to have the protection of rent stabilization or rent-control regulations, and that makes raising the rents to the skies in those apartments more difficult for landlords.

So when the elevator replacement began weeks ago, it was more than an inconvenience for the many senior citizens living in the six-story building. In effect, they had become prisoners in their apartments. Jane, who was hurt in a taxi accident, has been using two canes and the stairs to get in and out of her fourth-floor apartment. There are other frail occupants of the building whose lives have been seriously altered by the elevator replacement.

Jane Wood, longtime tenant advocate, was not about to take this lying down. Or maybe you could say she was going to take this lying down--on a mattress in the lobby of her building. She was dressed in a nightgown and nightcap, to graphically illustrate the fact that she may not be able to reach her own bedroom until the elevator is replaced.

She was surrounded by longtime friends, admirers, and housing activists from Met Council on Housing, Housing Conservation Coordinators and the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Developmen. Councilmember Christine Quinn, State Senator Tom Duane and aides representing Rep. Jerrold Nadler, City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, and Assemblymember Dick Gottfried were also present.

According to Bob Kalin of Housing Conservation Coordinators, Scharfman owns some 40-odd buildings in Hell’s Kitchen and is not beloved by his tenants. A tenant who lives in another Scharfman building in Chelsea said the landlord has been turning apartments over and giving new tenants month-to-month tenancy instead of the rent-stabilized leases required by law. Kalin also revealed that Scharfman has been the recipient of the city’s largesse, in the form of low-interest loans for rehabbing his properties.

While we all would agree that replacing an elevator takes time, there are solutions that minimize the disruption it causes elderly or disabled tenants. Working on weekends, double shifts of workers are some possibilities. But by all accounts, this is not a priority for Scharfman. There were suggestions that tenants take a trip to the landlord’s suburban home and let his neighbors know of the havoc he is causing in the lives of his tenants

All this current rush to rehabilitate our older buildings in Chelsea and many other neighborhoods is, of course, an attempt to displace older tenants and raise the rents. Even better, taking the apartments out of the rent-regulation system entirely, by claiming to have spent enough on renovations to get the rents up to $2,000