How ‘sweat’ it is: tenant
Ailing woman wins fight to use fancy gym
AN ELDERLY Upper West Side widow scored a $20,000 settlement after building management barred rent-stabilized tenants like her from using its fancy gym, the Daily News has learned.
Jean Green Dorsey, 75, said after paying off legal and other fees she will wind up with around $6,000 from Stonehenge Partners, which owns the primarily luxury development on W. 97th St.
She plans to give some of the money to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and to charities.
“I’m a believer if you can give, you should, and I’m lucky enough to not be as needy as I could be,” said Green Dorsey, who is on a fixed income and in desperate need of a kidney transplant.
A Harlem native whose husband died in 2013, Green Dorsey said she filed the complaint — alleging that only market-rate tenants could use the gym — because the policy made her feel like a “second class citizen.” A black woman raised by a mom who brought her to civil rights protests as a child, Green Dorsey said she had to fight back.
“I was the one out there picketing in Mary Janes, socks and a pinafore starched so tight it could stand by itself,” recalled Green Dorsey, who has lived in the building for more than 40 years.
Stonehenge will also have to pay the city $40,000 in penalties under the terms of the settlement reached last week with the Human Rights Commission. It has also promised to keep the gym open to all residents.
Green Dorsey and other rentstabilized tenants, holdovers from when the building was exclusively affordable housing and part of the city’s Mitchell-Lama program, had offered to pay extra to join the gym.
But the building — where luxury units go for as much as $4,000 a month — had claimed that the gym was “aimed specifically at new and prospective tenants who expect certain amenities” and rejected their offer from the rent-stabilized tenants to pay for the amenity.
That refusal put it in the cross hairs of the city’s Human Rights Commission, which last year agreed to hear the case after ruling the policy might be discriminatory.
Her complaint will now be dismissed as part of the settlement.
Public Advocate Letitia James, who had been a staunch supporter of Green Dorsey, lauded the resolution as a “major victory for equal rights.”
“In a city that embodies unrestricted diversity and opportunity, no resident should ever find discriminatory practices have invaded their own home,” she told The News.
Green Dorsey said she’s happy the case is behind her, and plans to join the gym soon.
Asked if the battle made her think of her mother, she said, “I always think about her. She was really before her time in terms of brain power and resilience.”