Monsoon Season Indoors for Noted Chelsea Hotel Artist

The ceiling in artist Michele Zalopany’s Chelsea Hotel apartment/studio has a leak—or rather several leaks.  There’s a two-foot hole in her living room ceiling where the water pours through--buckets when it rains.  Michele had to climb up on a ladder herself and remove the cracked and drooping plaster so it wouldn’t fall on somebody’s head.  She lately had to move her heavy couch from under the hole as well, to keep it from being soaked through.  On the other side of the living room there’s another large leak where water has seeped in through the ceiling and run down the wall, peeling the paint and bubbling up the plaster, which looks as if it could start falling anytime now.  And in the bathroom there’s yet another enormous leak where water streams in.
         Michele, a successful artist who also teaches at Harvard, says she approached the hotel’s Director of Operations Glennon Travis in August of 07—when she returned from a trip abroad--and he assured her that he’d take steps to rectify the soggy situation.  In her only contact with Glennon since then, Michele says that she found him to be, “unapproachable, inaccessible, and hostile,” when she wanted to discuss an unrelated matter. 

Meanwhile, the walls in Michele’s apartment—especially the one in the bathroom--have sprouted white mold, and Michele is developing respiratory problems.  She says she has itchy eyes, and sometimes has difficulty breathing, which makes it hard to sleep at night.

In my work for Chelsea Now, I visited several SROs in the Chelsea area where the landlord had purposely punched holes in the roof to introduce leaks into the building (a common tactic used to empty a building of rent stabilized tenants) and the leakage in Michele’s apartment was comparable to some of the worst I have seen.  Although there’s no indication here that the leakage was purposely caused, Michele says that when Stanley was in charge he could be counted on to send up the painter and the plasterer every few months to fix up the holes.
         Now, however, because the situation has been allowed to deteriorate for the past seven months, spot repairs probably won’t do the trick anymore.  (Michele knows of at least one other person on her floor who is enduring a similar situation.)  The bottom line is, the roof needs to be repaired.  And although this may present some problems because of the roof garden directly above Michele’s apartment, it simply has to be done, as every tenant in New York City is entitled to a warm, dry apartment that doesn’t make him or her sick.  “Marlene Krauss spoke about all the improvements that the new management is doing,” Michele pointed out, “and then when it comes down to the facts, they aren’t doing jack.”