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The ban covers not just around the building or in the lobby, mind you, but the residents’ apartments themselves—the very apartments that they have paid several hundreds of thousands of dollars to own (not rent, but own).
If this sounds crazy to you, you are obviously not a student of New York City real estate. Being normal, American homeowners, you may not even be aware of what a co-op board, that ultimate New York institution, is.
Here’s a primer: Basically, a co-op board is comprised of a handful of well-meaning people who are nonetheless still bitter that their promising political careers ended abruptly after serving as recording secretary in their high school student councils.
A co-op board is part sorority, part Soviet Union. Before you can move in to a co-op building in New York, you are interviewed by the board (just like Rush Week on campus, complete with hazing and other humiliations, but, alas, without the booze). And, if you’re approved, the co-op board controls every aspect of your life, from when you get to move in to how you can live once you do. (It’s only half a step removed from the days when Soviet housing managers used to assign tenants time slots on the communal kitchen stove.)
“Now they’re even going after pets!” one high-end realtor told me. “They interview your dog! It’s cutthroat. I’ve heard of people borrowing better-behaved dogs from their friends or giving their Chihuahuas doggie downers just to get through the interview. It’s sick.”
Co-op boards don’t sell apartments, mind you, but they do have the power to nullify that sale for any reason. Or for no reason, come to think of it. And they don’t even have to say why. In this case, though, the anti-smoking co-op board president did.
“The safety of the shareholders is our No. 1 concern,” board president Scott Wechsler told The New York Times (after not returning calls from papers and TV stations around the world.) “In the last couple of months, we’ve had a couple of fires in some of the neighboring buildings. We were told at least one of them was caused by smokers in bed.” (Not smoking in bed, mind you, but smokers in bed. Some of us have hot sex, but I guess with smokers, it’s positively combustible.)
Wechsler defended a co-op board’s power over a building’s tenants. “The concept of a co-op is you agree to conditions,” he said, sounding like a housing manager from Heroic Workers Complex Number 7 in Minsk. “If you have this great stereo and you want to play your stereo loud at night, you can’t do that. In our building, you can’t have a food delivery after 10 at night.” This city might never sleep, but Wechsler’s building has at least put stomachs to bed early. | |
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There might just be something in the water in Wechsler’s building that explains his board’s overactive adrenal glands. A lawyer I know told me that just a few years ago, he battled the very same board on behalf of a mother and daughter who liked to exercise in their apartment. It’s not as if they were watching the “Jane Fonda/Megadeath Workout” tape with the volume turned all the way to 11, mind you. Just a little harmless Stairmastering.
“A tenant two floors up and one apartment over—two floors up and one apartment over!—complained about the noise and the co-op board threatened legal action,” the lawyer told me. “It’s that kind of building.”
Exercise is bad enough, but combine a hyperactive co-op board with everyone’s favorite whipping boy—the demon weed tobacco—and you have a combustible mix. New Yorkers certainly need no encouragement to persecute smokers. A few years ago, the city banned smoking in restaurants with more than 35 seats. And now the City Council wants to ban smoking outright. Plus, smokers —who are already forced to huddle for warmth in front of their workplaces because they can’t smoke indoors—are now being pushed further from the front door of the building. Second-hand smoke, they say. (Second-hand smoke? I once lived in an apartment directly above a bus stop. Compared to first-hand diesel, second-hand smoke is like a walk through a perfume factory on the day the new lavender shipment comes in.)
Today, there’s only one building in the city where it is legal to smoke indoors—and, not surprisingly, it belongs to the nation’s largest tobacco company. It turns out that when the city passed its first no-indoor-smoking law, Philip Morris threatened to abandon its New York headquarters unless the city exempted its building from the law.
To this day, Philip Morris workers can smoke in meetings (and they do), at their desks (and they do) or even in the cafeteria (and, man, do they!). I was excited at having discovered the city’s last bastion of legal indoor smoking, so I called Philip Morris to see whether I could drop by to witness the once-common spectacle of indoor smoking first-hand. Spokesman Dave Tovar said he’d check with his superiors.
That was back in February. I’ve called Tovar two times a week—every single week—since then, yet he has not returned my call. My conclusion: Smoking an real-estate are such a divisive topic in New York that not even Philip Morris is willing to talk about smoking.
Back uptown, The Times asked Wechsler asked if his anti-smoking rule was an effort to regulate people’s lives, much like a big brother or, more accurately, Big Brother. Wechsler denied that such a thing was even possible. “We’re in New York City, for God’s sake!” (Yes, indeed, we are. This kind of stuff couldn’t happen anywhere else.)
My high-end realtor begged to differ. “It’s all about allowing what they want to allow,” he said. “I’d bet dollars to bagels that more people cook fish in that building than smoke cigars—but they ban smoking. They could’ve just as easily banned in-home fish-frying.” Don’t give this co-op board any ideas.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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