Ashes To Ashes, Dust To Dust

The landlord-tenant dispute that will only die when one of them does:

For nearly a quarter century, since Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, Lascelle Wright, 49, and his neighbors have been locked in a dispute with their landlord.

Even by the standards of New York City, where such disputes are blood sport, their face-off has become a long, strange war of attrition.

Mr. Wright is one of seven holdout tenants, most of them poor, elderly and in ill health. They want to remain in the Windermere, an echoing, ruined beauty of a building that was designated a city landmark in 2005. The alternative, they say, is the street.

Mr. Wright’s rent is $100 a month, but the landlord has provided no mailing address for his checks, so Mr. Wright has not paid even that.

A grand apartment house in the Romanesque Revival style, the Windermere is an eight-story building at West 57th Street and Ninth Avenue. It was famed in its late-19th-century heyday for its marble fireplaces, its uniformed “hall boys” and the latest in technological wonders, the hydraulic elevator and the telephone.

. . .

Nearly 7,000 miles away in Tokyo is [Masako] Yamagata. The head of the Toa Construction Company, he is 89 years old and hospitalized.

Last week, Mr. Yamagata did not respond to a list of questions. A woman who described herself as an employee supplied his age and the status of his health and said she would notify Mr. Yamagata of the inquiry. But she added, “I cannot tell you when he will or if he will answer at all.”

Last year, one of many housing activists who have tried to help the holdout tenants, Roseanne Haggerty, was finally granted a meeting with Mr. Yamagata in Tokyo after six years of entreaties.

She described him as white-haired and charming, if enigmatic. In a wood-paneled office that reminded Ms. Haggerty of an American recreation room from the 1970s, Mr. Yamagata had many American souvenirs, including a small Statue of Liberty and an ashtray with a New York logo.

In an informal gesture, he rolled up the sleeves of his white business shirt and showed Ms. Haggerty small scars on his arms from kidney dialysis. He could no longer visit New York because of his illness, he told her.

. . .

When Mr. Wright became a tenant in 1980, the Windermere was about half full, with about 80 families, he recalled.

By 1982, a previous landlord was offering incentives of up to $5,000 an apartment to vacate the building. Many left. By 1986, when Mr. Yamagata’s Toa Construction bought the building, Mr. Wright counted only a dozen or so families remaining, most protected from eviction under the city’s housing laws.

For the next two decades, the tenants and their advocates, in and out of housing court, attempted to resolve the standoff.

On Sept. 19, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, using reports from fire inspectors, cited Toa for 209 violations, including fire safety problems like exposed wiring, “the accumulation of refuse and/or rubbish” and “no electrical supply entire building.”

At the contempt hearing today, Mr. Yamagata could agree to the repairs.

If he does not, the city could perform the repairs and send him the bill.

Or some form of long-term alternative housing might be sought for the tenants until the building is habitable, according to Housing Conservation Coordinators.

Mr. Wright said he remained calm throughout the fight.

“I don’t curse, I don’t yell,” he said.

“The landlord is waiting for us to die,” he said. “But I’m 49, and he’s, what, almost 90?”