After arriving home from the arctic cold outside, Karlyn Murphy boils water on her stove, soaking her feet in blissful warmth.
For more than two years, her Brooklyn building has had sporadic heat and hot water — but the suffering has reached a new level of intensity with the recent polar chill.
The water ranges from tepid to icy. “Those of us who don’t have a gym membership for showering, or a friend nearby, resort to boiling water,” Murphy told The Post. One neighbor spends an hour each day heating water for bathing her two tots. Others stay at hotels.
Frustration and discomfort constitute business as usual for Murphy and her fellow tenants at 491 Keap St., atop Hotel Indigo in the heart of Williamsburg. But, finally, there may be some relief in sight.
Residents have been in an ongoing court battle with their notorious landlord, Meyer Chetrit, who was indicted last fall for harassing two elderly stabilized tenants in a Chelsea building he owns. The fancy Williamsburg building, opened in 2018 and where rents are in the thousands, is in foreclosure — owing at least $133 million to the mortgage lender, according to a different lawsuit. Con Ed has been threatening to turn off the utilities, which went unpaid by the landlord.
But late last month, a New York Supreme Court judge ruled that a summer-appointed receiver — someone designated to oversee the building — had not made needed repairs, including for heat and hot water. The tenants can now proceed with their efforts to get a different administrator — called a 7A administrator — to manage the building, collect rents and make repairs.
It is “painstakingly clear that repairs have been minimal to nonexistent since the receivership appointment on August 6, 2025,” judge Genine Edwards wrote, and “the receiver failed to adequately justify the delay in rectifying the hazardous conditions.”
The owner “simply abandoned the rental tenants,” according to court papers filed by Robin LoGuidice of Grimble & LoGuidice, who is representing the tenants, adding that the landlord has ignored the judge’s orders to provide heat and hot water.
A temporary boiler sits outside, but it is channeling heat mostly to the hotel — which occupies the bottom half of the building — and not to the renters, LoGuidice said. Even so, the boiler is inadequate for the building’s size. Hotel guests have left multiple online reviews complaining about the frigid water.
“This hotel allowed us to check in without notifying us that all of the water was ice cold (temperatures were in the teens, so it was brutally cold) and that we would be unable to shower during our entire stay,” wrote one recent one-star reviewer.
“No hot water at this hotel you can’t even shower,” wrote another. “Complained 2x to staff and it was never fixed. Don’t stay here!”
Last summer, now-retired judge Lawrence Knipel appointed a receiver, Jason Sackoor, and a management company, NYC Management, to oversee the building.
But they have been dragging their feet while the tenants suffer in the unforgiving cold, LoGuidice told The Post.
“The receiver waited until the storm of the century,” she said. “The building has several young families with infants.”
Rents in the building — opened in 2018 and described on StreetEasy as “an upscale and exciting new destination” offering “an effortless and elegant lifestyle” — range from the $3,000s to $6,400. The tenants have been paying rent into escrow.
The HVAC units have never worked well, court papers say, with tenants sweltering in the summer heat and, now, freezing in the winter chill.
“The building is in foreclosure proceedings,” Sackoor wrote in a statement to The Post, and the current management has been “addressing as expeditiously and effectively as possible many open issues that existed well before their appointments by the Court.”
The boiler was assessed, and “the boiler’s output isn’t sufficient for the building’s heating and hot water needs,” the statement added. The permanent boiler replacement must be “custom built because of the building’s unique construction.”
Meanwhile, “a temporary larger capacity boiler is on order since Jan 16 with five vendors . . . Even with multiple entities engaged in the search, delivery has taken longer than anticipated because of the high demand at this time of year.”
There was no need to wait until a cold snap, LoGuidice said. The bigger boiler was ordered only after she filed an emergency proceeding to ask the judge to force repairs, she told The Post.
If the heat isn’t restored, she requested that the judge allow the tenants — with priority for those with children — to be temporarily relocated to the hotel in the bottom half of the building. Space heaters won’t do — the electrical system is inadequate to support them, she said. She has so far had no response.
Murphy, a tenant of three years, said she has likewise e-mailed the building manager — also with no response — about providing tenants with access to a hotel room. “We tenants would work out a shower system among ourselves,” she told The Post. “We are willing to share one room just to bathe.”
Murphy has also been trapped in the balky elevator, and has been awakened by smoke alarms that shriek randomly, sometimes in the wee morning hours. “The alarm is going off so much that we are becoming desensitized to it,” Murphy told The Post.
The constant false alarms create a “boy who cried wolf” scenario, said another tenant — risky if a real fire were to break out.
“Given that this building is new construction, the number of violations is unconscionable,” LoGuidice wrote in court filings. The tenants suffer from “a complete lack of services, including a lack of superintendent and porter, lack of heat and hot water, elevator outages, lack of security,” along with rat infestations and trash pileup.”
As of last August, the violations have been corrected “to the extent possible,” according to an affidavit by a Chetrit employee. He acknowledges the “ongoing project to fix the existing boiler” but “the process is complicated because it requires certain parts.” He also said that the temporary boiler is sufficient and provides adequate heat.
“The respondents have not engaged in unlawful harassment,” a lawyer for Chetrit wrote in court papers. He did not reply to The Post’s request for comment, and a message left with The Chetrit Group was not returned.
The receiver, Sackoor, declined to comment on the most recent development, but said in a statement to The Post that “we walked into a hornet’s nest of issues,” in a building filled with “problems that were the makings of the building’s owner. We are doing everything we can on a daily basis to address these problems.”
Four years ago, one residential tenant instituted a class-action suit against the building, which has a 421-a tax abatement, for overcharging its tenants.
The rents in question “have been lawful” and “Plaintiffs were not overcharged,” the building’s lawyer wrote in reply. Later, that lawyer was allowed to withdraw from representing the building, due to a breakdown in communication and nonpayment of legal bills.
Meanwhile, the tenants bundle up and make do as best they can.
“I shower less,” one tenant told The Post. “I’ve gone days without a shower.”
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