BROADWAY BUILDING PASSES GAS INSPECTION AFTER WEEKS OF HEADACHES, RESTAURANT CLOSURES
More than a month after an apparent gas leak in the basement the building at 2701 Broadway between 103rd and 104th street caused Con Ed to turn off the gas, the building passed its gas inspection Tuesday, a Con Edison spokesman told us.
The building will “now be scheduled for turn-on,” the spokesman said, although he couldn’t say when that would happen (Update: he said Thursday morning that the gas had been restored to the restaurants.). The gas issue had caused four restaurants — Aangan, Broadway Pizza, Ollie’s and Sun Chan — to close for weeks.
Update: A Con Ed spokesman said the company had “installed a new gas service [a line from the gas main to the building] and then waited on the building owner/plumber to complete work on house piping. We had a field meeting with the plumber last week but the building was not ready for inspection and turn-on.”
Local residents had also been without gas. The building’s management had offered them electric hot plates, as noted in the letter below.
Photos via @Above_96th. Thanks to everyone who sent in tips and information.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to redact the mobile phone number in the letter from the photo?
Good point. It’s been redacted. WSR
If the gas is on soon, these folks will be fortunate. It took over 5 months at our UWS building last year (built in the 1920s). I never want to see a hot plate again.
Anyone know if Con Ed provides the restaurants with some sort of reimbursement for the lost business, or is it up to each to have business interruption insurance coverage to protect them from these kinds of disasters? And if the latter, fair to assume they all must have it as part of whatever blanket policy they’re required to have to open?
“Broadway Building Passes Gas” – that’s where I stopped reading…
Can’t stop laughing, Eugene. Not a joke for those folks though!
My building was out for a about three weeks when this happened – fortunately in August. Hot plate city!
Con Ed is not responsible for the lost business, and frankly shouldn’t br. They did the right thing in shutting off the gas if there was a safety risk. The building owner may be responsible — it could depend on the terms of the restaurants’ leases. The building owner could have insurance which would cover claims by the commercial tenants. The commercial tenants could have what’s called “business interruption” insurance if they have there own policies, but it is not standard coverage and could be limited.
Con Ed never appears to be in any sort of hurry to deal with leaks, and even when a building passes inspection is sometimes slow to restore service. It’d be nice to know more about their record and whether my perception is accurate. (I’m not suggesting this as a WSR project, by the way.) I’m just curious about what other readers have found when dealing with Con Ed. Any experiences worth retelling?
Back in my day, people used to pass gas in restaurants all the time and you didn’t hear me complaining about headaches. This city has gotten soft. I noticed this shift when they let that Laguardia and his liberal cronies run this city into the ground.
It took over a year for gas to be restored to all apartments in my prewar UWS building. Most apartments had had restored after about 5 months. In addition to putting in little effort to move the process along, management company could not be bothered to think about something like hot plates.
ConEd views this as a safety issue, not a service interruption issue. A property must prove it can internally transfer and deliver gas safely. After gas service to a building has been turned off by ConEd due to an interior leak, it is up to the building owner to independently certify the interior gas delivery piping of a building has no leaks, even when subjected to much greater than normal operating pressures. Only then will ConEd conduct their own pressure confirming testing. In many many buildings, passing the ConEd test requires replacing every gas valve in the property – as in every valve behind stoves, gas clothes dryers or gas-fired PTACs. Sometime the gas risers (interior vertical delivery pipes) must be also replaced. It is extremely disruptive, time consuming and expensive for the property owner. It is not unusual for a building whose gas has been turned off by ConEd to be without any gas service for several months or more.
Thanks for covering this, and i hope you can look into why it took 7 weeks to get this fixed — a huge threat to our beloved, small, family-owned businesses. If we truly care about protecting our small businesses, everyone involved has to resolve to do better. Of course, safety is paramount. But if there was the will, this situation could have been resolved in days, not weeks.
A recent filing on DOB’s website says the owner is 2701 Broadway Realty LLC. As do most buildings in NYC, it has a number of open violations — 12 open DOB violations and 6 open ECB violations and the owner owes ~$12,000 in ECB penalties.
StreetEasy shows the developer of the property is Hamid Khan:
http://streeteasy.com/building/2701-broadway-new_york
And I don’t know if it’s the same Hamid Khan (please check!) but here is a 20008 article about a landlord with the same name:
http://observer.com/2008/02/city-throws-slumlord-in-jail-for-nine-days-updated/:
“By Eliot Brown • 02/20/08 6:33pm
“The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development has scored a victory against Bronx landlord Hamid Khan, responsible for more than 2,000 housing violations at one property, as a judge sentenced him late last month to nine days in jail and ordered him to pay $156,000 in penalties, according to HPD. The city agency announced the decision today after squaring away details related to his jail time…..”
I know there are many people and agencies involved here. But the bottom line is that all involved must do better.
I lived in that building (residential address is 235 W 103rd). Mr. Khan is awful.