More than 60 of the hundreds of tenants displaced after a massive fire at a Jackson Heights apartment building in April are now suing the property’s owners and management, as well as city agencies.
They’re demanding that the building’s owners repair their homes so they may return — and let them back in soon to retrieve possessions from the still heavily damaged and inaccessible block-long complex.
The building remains surrounded by scaffolding and caution tape, with many windows boarded up. The eight-alarm blaze crumbled ceilings and destroyed interior walls, exposing wooden beams in their place.
Tenants allege that in the five months since the fire, Kedex Properties and city officials have provided little sense of when repairs will be completed, if any belongings can be salvaged and when residents might be able to return to their apartments.
Access to the building has been “unreasonable and severely limited,” according to the complaint filed Sept. 10 in Queens Housing Court targeting the owner, along with the city Department of Buildings and Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Several dozen tenants in one wing of the two-address, 133-unit building have been allowed scheduled visits to retrieve personal items. but former residents of more than 60 apartments in the other wing have not been granted that same privilege, said Andrew Sokolof-Diaz, the building’s tenant association president and a plaintiff in the suit.
New York City has launched a housing lottery for 134 units in the 17-story mixed-use building The Peninsula A1, also known as Edgemere Commons Apartments, at 51-23 Beach Channel Dr. in Far Rockaway.
Just days after the New York City Sheriff’s office shut down the illegal smoke shop “Haze Land” in Jackson Heights Thursday, the store ended up reopening, much to the chagrin of local leaders.
Police from the 112th Precinct in Forest Hills and Transit District 20 are looking for a man, who is built like an NFL player, for allegedly groping a 50-year-old woman as she waited for the subway near the Queens Center Mall in Elmhurst on Monday morning.
The victim was standing on the southbound M/R platform at the 59th Avenue subway station on the Queens Boulevard line when a stranger approached her and touched her left buttocks, police said. The brute fled the scene on foot in an unknown direction. The woman was not injured during the incident.
The New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI) has launched a probe into the death of Jesus Alberto Nunez Reyes, 65, who was shot and killed during an encounter with NYPD officers in Corona on Saturday morning.
At approximately 4:09 a.m. on April 20, police officers responded to 39-21 103rd St., where they encountered Nunez Reyes allegedly holding a knife. The officers repeatedly commanded him to drop the knife, but Nunez Reyes did not comply, and an officer fired at him, the AG’s office said in a brief statement. Nunez Reyes was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. Officers recovered a knife at the scene.