Court Order Lets Longtime Crown Heights Family Stay In Their Home

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — A three-generation Crown Heights family fighting to stay in their Park Place home celebrated another win in court on Monday, according to court records.

New York City Housing Court Judge Jack Stoller ruled Monday that the Robinson family — who have lived at 964 Park Pl. since 1951 — will be restored legal possession as tenants of the brownstone, records show.

The ruling comes nearly three weeks after activists first stepped in when one of the tenants, Sherease Torain, came home from surgery to find the landlords had changed her locks, according to the family. Previous court orders had prevented the landlord from entering the home while the case moved through housing court.

But Monday's eviction victory does not end the fight for the Robinsons, who say the home was stolen in a deed theft in 2015.

"The movement has done the impossible," the Crown Heights Tenants Union said Monday. "Now, a long fight to return the deed."

The Robinson family claim their landlord, Menachem Gurevitch, took over the home in 2015 after telling 98-year-old Ida Robinson he would help refinance the property and then forging the deed. The Robinson family was the first Black family on the block when they moved in in 1951, they said.

Torain — who is Ida's granddaughter — and her mother, Helen Robinson now live at the home.

Gurevitch's latest attempt to evict the Robinson family has been in the works since at least January 2020, based on a claim at the time that the tenants owed him $279,000, records show. The Robinson family say he has been trying to evict them since 2016.

On Monday, a spokesperson for Gurevitch contended the family now owes a total of $460,000.

"It’s disheartening that the respondents who sold the property for over $800,000 have ignored every judgment and court order for years are now being permitted to occupy a premises where they have lived rent free for six years," the spokesperson said by email. "This is an egregious misuse of measures created during the pandemic to help struggling tenants."

The Robinson family have maintained that they never received the $800,000 Gurevitch claims he paid for the home. Gurevitch has not provided proof of paying Ida Robinson, they said.

According to Monday's ruling, Torain had applied for the state's Emergency Rental Assistance Program in 2021 and was waiting on an appeal for their application when Gurevitch tried to kick them out in February, a few weeks after the moratorium on evictions during the coronavirus crisis came to an end, records show.

Under the law, tenants cannot be evicted while they wait on the results of a rental assistance application, including appeals, but Gurevitch failed to tell the court that Torain had appealed her case, according to court records.

The Robinson family and tenant activists have pointed to their situation as an example of rampant deed theft in Brooklyn, which has largely targeted communities of color. Crown Heights has lost 19,000 Black residents between 2010 and 2020, the most dramatic decline of any neighborhood across the five boroughs.