Crime & Safety
'We Don't Want To Burn To Death': Deaf NYC Tenants Plea For New Alarms
A Lower Manhattan building for the hearing impaired has sound-only alarms, according to a soon-to-be-filed federal class action lawsuit.
NEW YORK CITY — A legally deaf man plans to sue over what seems like a cruel joke: all the alarms are sound-only in his Lower Manhattan building, which was built for hearing-impaired tenants.
A class action lawsuit against an array of city entities — including the city's Housing Preservation and Development — will be filed this week in Brooklyn's federal court on behalf of Elewood Torres, said his attorney Andrew Lieb.
Lieb said the case is about providing long-asked-for safety and accessibility within two buildings on Forsyth Street near Stanton Street designed to be housing for hearing-impaired people.
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“That’s our case in a nutshell: we don’t want to burn to death," he said.
HPD officials told Patch their agency is not an owner of the building.
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The two buildings have 42 units designed for hearing-impaired people, but tenants have long complained about poor housing condition — as recounted in a 2020 story by Bowery Boogie and a 2021 piece by CBS New York.
The elevators in particular have broken down numerous times, Lieb said. He noted that the elevator's emergency systems, like the fire and smoke alarms, are auditory-only.
Such sound-only systems give legally deaf and hearing-impaired people no indications if their calls for help are being answered, unlike a video system, he said.
"Something to let a deaf person know they won’t be stuck in an elevator forever,” he said.
The complaint will accuse the building's owners — a tangle of public entities and other groups — of blatantly violating the Americans With Disabilities Act and the city's human rights law, Lieb said.
It will ask the building's owners and managers to install fire alarms with high-intensity strobe lights and vibration notification appliances, as well as video systems in the elevators.
Lieb said the problems are worsened by the fact that the building was intended to house hearing-impaired people.
“We think that’s preposterous based on a multitude of anti-discrimination laws,” he said.
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