Five Decades, One Gramercy Walk-up, and a Landlord Who Wants Them Gone

A rent-stabilized family occupying a two-bedroom on East 22nd Street has become the last residential holdout in a Gramercy building whose landlord has made clear he would prefer otherwise.

The family has lived in their rent-stabilized Gramercy apartment for roughly fifty years.
They occupy a two-bedroom in a building where they are now the sole remaining family tenants.
The landlord has pursued efforts to remove them, the specifics of which are detailed in the Curbed report.
The apartment reportedly contains five decades of accumulated family belongings and history.
Gramercy rent-stabilized units represent some of the most contested residential real estate in Manhattan.

At a walk-up on East 22nd Street in Gramercy, one family is still in place. They have been in place, by most accounts, for approximately fifty years. The building around them has changed. The tenants around them have not stayed. They have.

The apartment is a two-bedroom. Rent-stabilized. Overstuffed, according to reporting by Curbed, with the kind of accumulation that happens when a family does not move for half a century — furniture, photographs, the particular disorder of a home that has been a home for a very long time.

The landlord, per the Curbed piece, would like the unit back. The methods and filings involved in that effort are detailed in the source report. The family's position is, broadly, that they intend to remain.

Gramercy is not a neighborhood where rent-stabilized two-bedrooms become available and stay available. The median asking rent for a two-bedroom in the immediate zip code runs well above $5,000 a month. What the family pays is not disclosed in the Curbed piece, though the gap between those two numbers is where the entire story lives.

The apartment is described as holding five decades of family history. The landlord's preferred term for the situation is not recorded.