![]() ![]() "You don't hear nothing because they don't fix the intercom,” she said. When the I-Team visited her, she did not hear the intercom ring. Butler, who lives just a few yards away from the stairwell where Gurley was killed, said her front doorknob had been broken for months, and even after a NYCHA repair worker came to fix the problem, it persisted. Naomi Butler, the mother of Gurley’s former girlfriend, has complained for months about security in the building, especially as it pertains to door locks and the intercom. The federal inspectors also classified some deficiencies as “systemic,” including broken refrigerators, broken glass in stairwell doors, insect and roach infestations, mold and/or mildew and peeling paint. Based on that sample, they projected more than 1,300 health and safety deficiencies, including one “life-threatening” deficiency. Of those 159 scores, only fifteen were lower than 62.ĭuring their examination of the Pink Houses, federal inspectors examined 24 residential buildings and 27 units inside those buildings. That is worse than about 90 percent of all New York City Housing Authority facilities inspected by HUD between May of 2012 and January of 2014.Īccording to the HUD data, which includes scores for 159 New York City Housing Authority facilities, the average public housing facility scored 75 in the most recent round of federal inspections. In 2013, the collection of East New York buildings scored 62 out of 100 points on its inspection. But long before police said Akai Gurley was accidentally killed by a rookie cop, federal regulators knew about severe repair problems at the public housing complex.Ī federal Housing and Urban Development report, obtained by the I-Team through a Freedom of Information Request, shows the Pink Houses are among the city's worst kept public housing facilities. Gilliam, a retired truck driver who has lived at the complex for 43 years.Lighting problems at the Pink Houses in Brooklyn made headlines after police shot an innocent, unarmed man in a dark stairwell. ''We had plenty of visitors who wanted to sit on it, feel how it was,'' said Mr. One of his neighbors stitched a cover to protect the sofa's soft leather, but it soon came off after pressure from curious onlookers. ''I was cussed out,'' he said, chuckling. Gilliam said, residents of other city housing projects called to inquire why Cooper Park was the lucky recipient. ''You never question a high official about what they do,'' Mr. ![]() No one seems to know exactly how the infamous pink sofa ended up at Cooper Park Houses, a patchwork of low-rise brick buildings tucked amid row houses and warehouses on the northern edge of Brooklyn. Walker, 77, a retired Federal Government worker. ''The city spends more money on everything, probably,'' said Mr. He sat across it one gray morning last week and leafed through his morning paper, musing skeptically about politicians. Harold Walker, the president of the Cooper Park senior center, was neither eager to sing its praises nor comment on the wisdom of a $3,000 couch. ''We've been taking care of it ever since.'' ''We were pleased to get it,'' Hershey Gilliam, 71, recalled. The couch is still unblemished, though slightly muddied at the legs. Today, it is adorned simply with two pillows sewn by a Cooper Park resident. She resigned in February 1992, and the sofa was carted away to the tiny front room of the Cooper Park Houses Senior Citizens Center. If furniture could talk, one wonders what a pink leather couch would say of its downward trajectory from centerpiece of a scandal in the Dinkins administration to obscurity in a tidy recreation room of a Greenpoint public housing project.įour years ago, the stylish three-seater, purchased with $3,000 in city funds, became a symbol of former Housing Commissioner Laura Blackburne's lavish office refurbishment.
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