Two Months & Counting With No Cooking Gas For Harassed Tenants In East Village Building; Con Ed Refuses To Restore Service Until Leaky Gas Pipe Repairs Are Made; Landlord Responds By Offering Residents Free Ice Cream

In New York City, The Real Deal (New York City) reports:

• Ice cream, it turns out, doesn’t heal all wounds.
  
  Just ask the tenants of 325 East 12th Street, who gathered [] to protest an ice cream social held by their landlord, Raphael Toledano’s Brookhill Properties. Ice cream may seem like an innocuous olive branch, but for these tenants it dripped with disrespect. According to tenants, they’ve gone without gas service in the building since May 18, and free ice cream is not exactly the remedy they were expecting.
  
  “It’s an abomination to the human spirit, and you can’t fix it with Ben & Jerry’s,” said SaMi Chester, a tenant organizer with the Cooper Square Committee.
  
  Roughly a dozen protestors surrounded a lone Ben & Jerry’s truck parked on East 5th Street between Second and Third Avenues. [...] Confused passersby were offered free ice cream while the protestors shouted variations of “Ice cream, you scream we all scream for cooking gas!” The truck, which had been parked for a few hours before the protests, drove away after a few minutes of the shouting.
  
  ***
  A representative for Con Ed said that the shutdown was prompted by an internal gas leak at the 12th Street building and that the company can’t restore service until Toledano makes necessary repairs.
  
  One resident of the 12th Street building, Liz Haak, 71, said that while she has an electric stove, she’s seen other tenants unable to cook since the gas was shut off nearly two months ago. She said a contractor had made appointments with residents to return gas to their homes but had inexplicably canceled. Since then, Haak said, the landlord has done “diddly squat” and instead offered up “useless ice cream” to people who can’t cook dinner in their homes.

For more, see Tenants to Toledano: Screw your ice cream, give us gas (Residents say gas at 325 East 12th St. was shut off 2 months ago).