Freddy De Los Santos says he dreads asking neighbors to carry him up the stairs when the elevator goes out at his Bronx building.

Just a few months ago, it took three strong backs to get Mr. De Los Santos and his wheelchair up to his fifth-floor apartment.

“They were really nice,” said Mr. De Los Santos, who is paraplegic and lives on the Grand Concourse. “But that’s not their job.”

Across this vertical city, millions of people rely on elevators every day without complaint. But there are hundreds of buildings where the elevators malfunction or break down routinely.

And when they do, all the patterns of life are disrupted.

The elderly miss doctors’ appointments. Frozen food thaws downstairs. Ambulance crews carry patients down dim, steep stairwells.

Mr. De Los Santos, 52, a street musician who plays the flute, says he skips performing and church and stays home, feeling trapped and angry.

“I’m afraid to go outside because the elevator won’t be working when I get back,” he said.

In thousands of other cases, elevator riders are literally trapped, a problem that is occurring with soaring frequency. The Fire Department responded to more than 11,000 calls last year from people stuck in elevators, a 49 percent increase from two years earlier.

Residents of buildings with problem elevators complain — to their landlords, the maintenance staff, tenant associations, eventually to the city — but say their complaints do little good. The city sends out inspectors, sometimes dozens of times to one building. But often, the inspections do not lead to lasting repairs.

Indeed, in buildings across the city, frustrated residents turn to the city for help and find that its enforcement effort can be alarmingly ineffective, a New York Times examination has found.

Sometimes, even when all a building’s elevators are out, inspectors do not arrive for weeks. Even when violations piled up, the city seldom used its power to cite problem buildings as repeat offenders, according to city statistics from the 2005 fiscal year.

In a third of infractions, the city does not fine the violators. And when fines are levied, some owners ignore them with impunity. More than half the $4.2 million in fines assessed by the city in 2003 remained unpaid more than two years later, city officials said. After eight years, by city law, they are wiped off the books.

The city Buildings Department is charged with regulating more than 56,000 elevators in 20,000 buildings of all sorts — private and public, commercial and residential. But its efforts have been undercut by a depleted inspection staff, inadequate laws and modest enforcement goals, experts say.

As its own manpower has declined, the city’s elevator unit has asked the real estate industry to police itself, and enforcement has increasingly evolved into an honor system.

Thousands of elevator inspections once done by the city are now handled by private companies. Some of the companies are hired and paid by the landlords themselves. Often these companies are inspecting the same elevators they are paid to maintain, a system prone to conflicts, some experts said.

Owners are typically permitted to settle violations, and avoid fines, by filing a sworn statement that they have made the repairs. The city verifies only a fraction of them.

“If you don’t do anything, nothing happens,” said Scott T. Hayes, an elevator consultant for building owners in the city. “Nobody is going to come track you down.”

Many landlords say they cannot afford new elevators because city-approved rent increases are too low to pay for major repairs, said Frank Ricci, a spokesman for the Rent Stabilization Association, a building owners’ group. Owners of rent-controlled and rent-stabilized buildings can apply for additional increases for major elevator upgrades.

City officials say that in the vast majority of cases, elevators are safe, and appropriate repairs do get done.

“There are always going to be individual buildings where the owners are unresponsive,” said Ilyse Fink, a Buildings Department spokeswoman, “or repairs are of limited success due to other factors, such as chronic vandalism. These are the exceptions and not the rule.”

Officials said that many firefighter rescues are probably a result of new technology that makes elevators prone to shut down if a safety problem arises. And there are limits, they said, to what the government can do.

“We don’t force people to renovate their elevators,” said Hirem E. Vyas, who directs the agency’s elevator unit. “We don’t tell them to replace. We just cite violations.”

But critics question a system that fails to curb the most persistent problems. According to city records, since January of last year, 328 buildings — most in poor or middle-class neighborhoods, some with no history of other problems — have each had 10 or more elevator complaints filed by residents. In a dozen buildings, residents complained 50 or more times.

Over all, the agency got more than 11,000 elevator complaints during the fiscal year that ended in June, a 10 percent jump from the prior year and more than double the number of two years ago. Officials attribute the surge to growing awareness of the new 311 complaint phone line.

Indeed, the Bloomberg administration cites its timeliness in responding to complaints, and an increase in inspections, as evidence of effective enforcement.

But conditions remain wearisome at buildings like 34-15 Parsons Boulevard, a seven-story building in Queens, or 2842 Grand Concourse, a six-story apartment house in the Bronx. Residents at those two buildings have filed 64 complaints since January of last year. Though city inspectors have responded 43 times and issued 19 violations, residents say the elevators still routinely malfunction.

“Doesn’t the city have a way of pressuring the landlord?” asked Terry Meiley, who has lived in the Grand Concourse building for 30 years. “I don’t want perfection. I just want an elevator I can count on.”

Unpredictable Ride

With its gleaming marble interiors and gilded moldings, the six-story, 66-unit building at 2842 Grand Concourse retains an ornate Old World charm. But tenants describe the elevator like an old carnival amusement: full of sudden stops and strange noises.

People get stuck between floors routinely, they said, like the 15-year-old asthmatic girl whose shouting filled the hallways a few months ago. Firefighters had to rescue her.

With the equipment out of service, residents like Ms. Meiley, who has emphysema, and Luz Torres, who has arthritis, find themselves climbing the stairs, pausing to rest at every landing.

Residents say the alarm goes off so often that some people don’t pay attention to it anymore.

“We’re stuck up here,” said Joe Barrinello, a fifth-floor resident who uses a wheelchair.

Since January of last year, tenants have filed 38 complaints with the Buildings Department.

“The city knows,” about the problems, said Jose A. Santana, on the third floor. “The city doesn’t do anything about it.”

During that period, inspectors made 26 trips to the building and issued 11 violations.

The building’s owner, Michael Laub, said the elevator is safe and defended his efforts to keep it running, despite what he said were shrinking profits from Bronx rental buildings. He said that vandalism and tenant abuse, not neglected maintenance, cause most of the malfunctions. “They urinate or they rip down a mirror or they pull the stop button,” he said. City officials said that over time, urine can corrode elevator mechanisms.

But the explanations do not do much for Mr. De Los Santos, another resident of the building. He still remembers the night last summer when he came home from playing his flute at Grand Central Terminal. It was 1 a.m., and he found the elevator out again. It was too late to wake the neighbors, so he wheeled himself over to a nearby park and pitched his head on a table.

Bed.

“It’s something I don’t want to do again,” he said.

Hired Help

Elevator oversight — the task of ensuring that elevators are safe, in service and up to code, and imposing penalties when they are not — is a challenge for many cities. In New York, enforcement has been handicapped by the loss of nearly half the city’s elevator inspectors over the past 15 years. Most were fired or left after a corruption scandal a decade ago.

As the inspection staff slid from 79 people in 1991 to 43 today, the city chose not to hire replacements. Instead, it turned some work over to private companies. The city continues to send its own inspectors out in response to complaints and accidents. But responsibility for the bulk of routine inspections was given to private companies, some working for the city under contract, others working directly for building owners.

The companies must inspect all the elevators in the city five times every two years. About half of these inspections are performed by companies hired by the landlords.

Such a system, where a company performs both maintenance and inspections for a landlord, poses too many potential conflicts, said George W. Gibson, an elevator expert from Arizona who sits on national code committees. “The owner is bound to say, ‘Why am I paying you all this money and I’m still getting a violation?’ ” he said.

The city says that by using the private companies, it is responding more quickly to complaints and accidents. By its own measures, during the fiscal year that ended in June, the city responded to 96 percent of emergency complaints within its target of 1.5 days. It defines an emergency as a hazardous situation like an elevator running with its doors open.

The city responded “on time” to 90 percent of routine complaints, its statistics show. But in 2004 the city redefined what it means to be on time — extending the deadline for responding to routine complaints to 40 business days from 25, records show. That means inspectors can take weeks to respond to a building without a working elevator.

The records also show that when inspectors arrive, their response can be redundant. One morning last year, three inspectors showed up separately at the same Brooklyn building, each tracking a different complaint.

“We now route our complaints differently to better utilize our inspectors’ time,” Ms. Fink said.

Stuck Inside

Of the 11,385 elevator rescues in 2005, several occurred at 122-05 Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn, a nine-story apartment building that is home to many middle-class families and retirees. It had the most complained-about elevators in the city until their replacement this year.

In May 2005, for example, Prince A. Punnett and his wife, Yolanda, returned from shopping to find one of the two elevators working. It should not have been in service.

Three days earlier, a city inspector had shut it down as unsafe: the sliding door was missing the devices that keep it in its track. He issued a cease-use order, meaning the elevator was not to be put back into service until city inspectors had returned to see that it had been repaired.

But the door was open and the power on when the Punnetts boarded, headed for their fifth-floor apartment.

The managers of the building, one of 17 in a condominium complex called Fairfield Towers, said that none of their staff had authorized anyone to restart the elevator.

Mr. Punnett was carrying a 20-pound ham for a dinner in honor of his granddaughter. He recalled that near the third floor, the elevator stopped, trapping himself, his wife, two other adults and a child.

They pressed the alarm and shouted for help, he said. Nothing happened. With little ventilation, it began to get hot.

“Everybody was calm,” Mr. Punnett said. “But you could see the fear in their faces.”

After 10 minutes, a neighbor called through the doors, he said. She would get maintenance. But no one from maintenance came.

After 15 minutes, she called 911. Firefighters from Ladder Company 103 and police officers arrived, pried the doors open and rescued the five people, he said. They had been stuck for 45 minutes.

Recently, the management accelerated its plan to renovate elevators at the complex and replaced the two at 122-05 Flatlands Avenue.

“Nobody wants the elevator service better than us,” said David Brooks, a spokesman for the majority owner, the Lightstone Group, a New Jersey company that had sponsored the complex’s condominium conversion.

It was not a moment too soon for residents, who said that for years, lawsuits, complaints, and letters to politicians had done little to solve the problems, even after a woman in another building in the complex died in a 2002 elevator accident.

Elevators at five Fairfield Towers buildings ranked among the most complained about, according to city records. The elevators at 122-05 Flatlands, in particular, had been the subject of more than 100 complaints since January 2005.

Residents blamed management. The city blamed vandals. Lightstone, which still owns the management company and most of the apartments, said the condominium board, which it does not control, had refused to raise the assessments needed to pay for elevator improvements, a charge the board denied. Lightstone paid for the replacement elevators itself, Mr. Brooks said.

The building still owes all but $500 of the $10,500 in fines assessed in the past 18 months, but it is seeking a reduction because, it says, some violations were undeserved.

The Honor System

When city inspectors responding to a complaint find a problem, they often write a violation that mandates repairs. But given the shortage of staff and the number of yearly violations, nearly 6,000, the city is unable to routinely check whether repairs are made as ordered.

Years ago, the city policy was different. Inspectors were required to verify repairs.

Today, only hazardous violations get reinspected. For nonhazardous violations, like an elevator that skips floors or is out of service, the city requires only that an owner submit a certificate swearing that the problem has been fixed. The owner is supposed to attach a repair receipt.

To check the accuracy of the certificates, the city audits a sample of them and, like the Internal Revenue Service, threatens to prosecute those owners caught lying.

During the 2005 fiscal year, the city audited 161 of the 3,218 certificates submitted. In hundreds of violations, the city acknowledges, owners never filed certificates.

City officials said they believe the repairs were completed in many cases, but the owners neglected the paperwork. There is no penalty for failing to file.

The department is working to increase the number of spot checks, Ms. Fink said.

John R. Quackenbush, a safety and health consultant on elevators, said many cities use private companies to make inspections.

But New York is among the most lenient when it comes to setting deadlines or checking whether repairs have been made, he said. In other places, he said, “You’re whacked right away.”

At the Flatlands building, which has received 16 violations since January 2005, the owners resolved 14 of them without penalty by submitting certificates attesting to repairs. One certificate reported that an elevator was fixed on March 14, 2005. But that night a complaint came in that both elevators were broken. Five more would arrive by week’s end, city records show.

None of the certificates were ever checked by the city.

City officials said they cannot single out buildings with a lot of complaints when auditing certificates because city lawyers told them it could be considered selective enforcement.

The repairs had been made by the maintenance company at the time, Premier Elevator Industries.

In 1999, Premier’s president was fined $5,000 by city regulators for giving money to an inspector, an incident the president described as extortion.

Three years later, the city questioned Premier’s account that a fatal elevator accident at another building in the complex had been caused by a mechanical malfunction.

A mechanic was working in the motor room when the elevator suddenly shot up, doors open, crushing a 70-year-old woman as she boarded, according to the city’s accident report. The report characterized the company’s account as unlikely.

Premier’s lawyer, Stuart D. Schwartz, said it had warned for years that elevators in the complex needed upgrades.

He disputed the city’s findings, saying rescue efforts had damaged the elevator and compromised the ability to determine the accident’s cause.

Last fall, the Fairfield Towers management replaced Premier with another contractor.

Over the Roof and Home

One must be resourceful to live at Newport House, an apartment building on Parsons Boulevard in Flushing, Queens, the residents say.

The seven-story building is split into two wings, one of which has an elevator that often breaks down, they say.

Tenants in that wing have learned to go to the other side and ride up to the roof, where they cross to their side of the building and take the stairs down.

“Everybody in the building knows how to cross over the roof,” said Carolyn Goldstein, 70, of the seventh floor, who has lived in the building for 28 years. “I think I know the roof better than the elevator.”

Last Christmas Eve, tenants said, preparations for the holiday included carrying their presents across the roof in the cold.

As people tote packages and strollers across the roof, the young help the old, the fit assist the infirm, said Maureen Adler, 49.

“Because of the elevator we’ve become a family,” she said.

The Buildings Department has received 26 complaints about the elevator since January of last year, though none in the past two months. It issued eight violations, nearly all of them settled by affidavits from the building owner saying that repairs had been made.

As a result, no fine has been assessed in more than five years.

Nathan Katz Realty, the owner, said it has a 24-hour repair service that responds quickly to all elevator problems.

“Elevators that are 15 to 20 years old like this, stuff happens,” said David Levy, the president. “It happens because of mechanical failure. It happens because of negligence by tenants and their kids.”

Richard Keary, 56, the tenants’ association president, said the landlord makes repairs, but they sometimes did not last more than a few days.

“For the last 15 years they’ve been fixing it with chewing gum,” he said. “It really needs a replacement.”

All the complaining has worn the tenants down. Ms. Adler said she has given up calling 311.

“It seems futile,” she said. “If you keep hitting your head against the wall, eventually you stop.”

Jo Craven McGinty contributed reporting for this article

 

Work safe

Brother Tom Moore

tmlocalone@aol.com

  MONDAY AUGUST 14, AT LIC UNION HALL.

LOCAL ONE, IUEC FIRST QEI CLASS

 

 

Taylor Technologies Group - Elevator Consultants

 

Michelle Blankenship-Taylor
michelle@taylortech.com

 FOR ALL THE BROTHERS & SISTERS WHO ARE TAKING THIS FIRST QEI CLASS.

Please come into the Union Hall and check in then go into the class room.

Thanks.