Stuyvesant Town

Pathetic mess, be prepared to get a parking ticket when you move in...but they love you if you consume a ton of weed.

I lived at Styutown for three years and, although some things were nice, the majority of my interaction with the staff was beyond unpleasant. It began when I told them I may need to terminate my lease because of a relocation. They wanted over $11,000 to get out early. Apartments in this complex are vacant about 2-3 weeks so that seemed a bit extreme. Relocation done.

Then we had trouble with a rampant weed smoker in the building. We called resident services (a complete misnomer for those morons) and all they said to do was call security - a group of useless rent a cops. We followed directions like idiots, only to have Barney Fife show up 20-30 minutes later, long after the weed fiend was gone. I am glad I never had any kid of real emergency in this insane asylum.

We finally had enough and decided to move out. God forbid we forgot to send back the lease stating that we were not going to renew. They sent us a lovely little letter from their legal department threaten action against us if the form was not returned. Too bad I didn't know they would evict me for being forgetful or I would have developed a really bad case of the WTFs when I was going through the before mentioned relocation.

The final idiot move came today when my wife and I were moving some of the stuff out of our apartment. We came back to the van to find a Stuytown rent-a-cop writing us a ticket. My wife went over and told him we were moving and his response - "You can only park here for 20 minutes. You need to move your vehicle or I will ticket you again." What???!!! How in the hell do they expect you to move in or out of an apartment in 20 minute chunks with their slow as death elevators (2 per building) while also moving your vehicle around the block because of some fools arbitrary time schedule? One poor guy had just returned from a camping trip and was unloading the gear when he got a ticket. Lovely rent-a-cops they get here. Again, we contacted resident services to let them know what was happening and in true form they punted. "Call public safety and talk to them" was their reply. Wonderful advice -- call the idiots giving out the tickets to ask them to stop ticketing people who are moving when they already think it is a good idea to give out tickets.

Look, live here if you like stupidity and a management company who could care less about the tenants. To them, the tenant is just a dollar sign and when one leaves they are banking on an uninformed sucker to wander in the door as the other leaves. Don't be fooled (or a fool), rent somewhere else.

Dogs walk people wherever they want to go and leave gifts. There is a loud vocal choir from dogs at all hours day & night. And the NYU students also howl at the moon anytime they please. No security unless you call and then can take 15-30 minutes, Thus closed windows 24/7 in fall and winter and a/c Spring & summer. Brown water on occasion - make sure you have a friend or gym nearby! Workers in golf carts have missed me twice on sidewalks. washer/dryers? go to a laundry! Management is uninterested though the lip service is A+.

Every city has a Stuy Town. It's that urban residential area that isn't in proximity to anything important and is nothing but generic apartment complexes jammed under a freeway.

The best part about Stuy Town is leaving Stuy Town, in that it is fairly close to the more exciting parts of lower Manhattan. The apartments are affordable and decent on the inside and you have access to all the basics. It's a quiet area without much happening so if that's you thing, and you're not high on aesthetics (or at least it is not as high on your list as a decent rent) it's a decent place to live.

There are no tourist attractions which is fine because it isn't that easy to get to by train. There is certainly nothing to see here.

At the end of the day, Stuyvesant Town offers nothing more than a place to hang your hat at night and the ability to live in the city within proximity to the better aspects of Lower Manhattan. The rents are okay, the area is mostly quiet. At the same time, there aren't many places to grab some food or a drink and not much entertainment or nightlife to be found anywhere. You're right by East Village though which means not having to go very far to get those things.

Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village jointly make a private residential area on the lower east side of Manhattan. This is quite a historical area, especially with regard to the early days of New York City when the Dutch settled. (Peter Cooper founded Cooper Union where Abraham Lincoln gave a key speech.) The development runs from East 14th to East 23rd Streets and is far on the eastern part of Manhattan from First Avenue to Avenue C in Alphabet City. Stuyvesant Square and Stuyvesant High School are very well-known, and Beth Israel Medical Center is in this area.

They started constructing the current apartment buildings in the 1940s, and they were reasonably priced in the past. There are some larger apartments here, but they're decidedly pricey now thanks to a recent sale of the real estate. One-bedroom units go for about $3,000 and up a month. There's controversy here, too. Lawsuits have been filed because the new landlord is trying to charge higher rents of the current tenants.

Personally, I'm not all that fond of this area and wouldn't want to live here, especially since the controversy really rubs me the wrong way. And now that the rents have become so high, I couldn't consider it if I wanted to.

If you want to visit a place that has just condos and expensive apartment buildings, you've come to the right place. Stuyvesant Town is not what people may think it to be. There really is not much going on there except for people going in and coming out of their places.

There are better places to live and visit. If you want beauty, try Central Park.

When Tishman Speyer took control of the Stuyvesant Town properties a few years ago, they made a big deal in the press about how they were going to spend millions of dollars on planting new trees and flowers all over the complex. This was a way of underscoring the failed attempt to turn Stuy Town's affordable housing units into luxury condos, a plan that went seriously wrong recently with the purchasers defaulting on their billion-dollar loans. Anyways, how they went about beautifying the complex was by ordering trees and flowers to be delivered and then leaving them above ground for weeks to die. Many of the plants ended up in the compost heap, or died soon after planting, and now that the money for this kind of beautification project has dried up, Stuy Town is as ugly and depressing as it ever was. The 80-acre park is a world unto itself, with apartments that are reportedly very spacious but very poorly maintained. This brick enclave is situated in the middle of Manhattan, and surrounded by neighborhoods that are so much more attractive and interesting, like Gramercy Park, the Flatiron District, and Union Square. The only real advantage to living in the complex is proximity, but otherwise it's hard to see how this desolate area would have become a land of luxury condos.

I don't really get Stuy Town or why these big, ugly impersonal city blocks would be an attractive place to buy a luxury condo. But apparently not everyone agrees with me, for this former low income housing community was bought by Met Life in 2000, with the intention of renovating the rental units for the luxury market and jacking up rent prices accordingly. This plan turned out to be a spectacular failure, as the original tenants resisted eviction, and the plan of converting apartments didn't go quickly enough to pay off the creditors on the purchase loan. As a result, the investors defaulted in January of this year, and Stuy Town is set to remain a rent-stabilized enclave until at least 2017, when it will finally be deregulated. Not quickly enough for Met life, though.

All in all, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town are an enormous collection of red brick apartment towers that stretch from First Avenue to Avenue C, and cover the area between 14th and 23rd Streets. They are, and they look very much like housing projects, with about 56 residential buildings total. There are about 25,000 residents total, and the towers have their own “peace officers” who police the area.

Stuy Town has been under a lot of scrutiny lately, and I understand why, but what the man is doing over there doesn't really surprise me . . . especially for Manhattan. When I first moved to New York, I looked at an apartment in Stuy Town and I have a number of friends who live there. The neighborhood is not so great. There's a Starbucks, a Blockbuster, a Duane Reade and a McDonalds. That's, seriously, the neighborhood. The rest is just street and it's kind of desolate. But, I can see the appeal of living there, nonetheless. The immediate neighborhood is nothing to sing about but it is in downtown Manhattan so everything is really close and attainable. And, the apartments in Stuy Town / Peter Cooper Village are huge. I don't mean NY huge. They are enormous. They are completely re-done so there isn't a scratch on the wood, a scoff on the stainless steel appliances, a crack in the grout. And, the buildings are really secure. They are really quite nice and the price point isn't that high considering how big and new the spaces are. I know people who live in much smaller apartments for almost twice what the rent is at Stuy Town. And, the apartments accept pets (which is rare), they have concerts in the Stuy Town parks (they have their own parks) and there is concierge, a private gym, and lounges with Wifi. It's really a pretty cush deal even if you aren't one of the lucky few who managed to get a unit before the overhaul. But, I think those rent - controlled lucky ducks are meeting their end -- hence, all the flack that Stuy Town is taking. They're pushing the rent controlled out to redo their apartments and bump the rent up. Again, I don't know why anyone is surprised about this.

If you have an apartment in this middle income housing development, you were doing something right at one point. Nowadays, though residents here are dealing with a lot of changes, and things are looking pretty confusing for them at the moment.

The housing projects were recently sold to real estate mogul Tishman Speyer, and attempts are being made at selling remodeled apartments as "luxury" condos. Currently the Tenants Association find themselves at odds with Tishman Speyer, and many likely face a long legal battle so as not to be driven from their own apartments.

If you completely ignore this conflict, this happens to be a nice neighborhood, close to the relatively quite Gramercy Park and the bustling East Village, there is something for both elderly residents and their fun loving visiting grandchildren.